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If widescreen monitors are taking over the world, is it time to expand websites beyond 800 pixels wide?
My site is 720 pixels wide, and nearing time for tweaking, or for redesign.
Can I go to 1024 pixels?
How many viewers will like it?
How many will I lose?
When I created mine I wrote code to adjust the width to the screen size of the user. Keep in mind this was written a long time ago and may not be what most would use now. The site still adjusts to screen with so it does work. This code adjusts the graphic for the header, which I created in multiple sizes...
var width = screen.width;
var height = screen.height;
var d = this.window.document;
//document.write("You're set to "+width+ "X" +height+"");
{if (width == 640) {
var header="'Header_trajax640.gif'";
var logo="'NewLogo640.gif'";
} else if (width == 800) {
var header="'Header_trajax800.gif'";
var logo="'NewLogo800.gif'";
} else if (width == 1024) {
var header="'Header_trajax1024.gif'";
var logo="'NewLogo1024.gif'";
} else if (width == 1152) {
var header="'Header_trajax1152.gif'";
var logo="'NewLogo1152.gif'";
} else {var header="'Header_trajax800.gif'";
var logo="'NewLogo800.gif'";
Who is your audience? If you are looking for the minimal size standard you should know the typical viewer to your site. Personally I think 1000 is safe for width, 600 still the best bet for depth; in general 1024 has been a standard for a while now.
One way i got around variable screen size was to use tables with * widths and absolute widths, and overlap a standard fixed with image that blended into a table background - no matter the width of the screen, anything over the minimal width (say 800) would look seamless and normal while minimizing code overhead.
Who is your audience? If you are looking for the minimal size standard you should know the typical viewer to your site. Personally I think 1000 is safe for width, 600 still the best bet for depth; in general 1024 has been a standard for a while now.
My audience is broad, from all levels of computer use and technical ability.
Most come to me on Google, etc.
So I was thinking 1024, but just wanted to get some other thoughts.
Two years ago many people were very vocal in the opinion that I had to be as narrow as possible to catch everyone.
But, I'm thinking anyone working on an 800x600 view is accustomed to doing a lot of side-scrolling.
Yeah, 1024x768 I think is the minimum standard these days. Most users either have high-resolution 4:3 monitors or 16:9 anymore that at least are 1024 wide.
Personally, I like to zoom in on websites because the text is often so small, so even though I use a 19" widescreen most often for website viewing (1440x900 max res), and sometimes a 1280x1024 display, I prefer sites with a little less width to allow for some room to zoom. My favorite are the ones that adjust according to screen size and with word wrapping.
Fyi, typically you can just press "cmd +" or "control +" to make the text larger, - to make it smaller. Its easier than zooming the screen since all it does it increase the font. This is also why most people stick with ~1000 px resolutions even though monitors can go higher - text gets too small to read.
Fyi, typically you can just press "cmd +" or "control +" to make the text larger, - to make it smaller. Its easier than zooming the screen since all it does it increase the font. This is also why most people stick with ~1000 px resolutions even though monitors can go higher - text gets too small to read.
True, but many websites don't deal with this very well either, YouTube for example constrains the text to a certain area, no matter how big it is. So you get the bottom half of the text line cut off or more if you zoom text only.
If true, that is bad web design, but some of that is the behavior of the browser. Afaik Mozilla does not let that happen for example, but I have seen sites that do that before - it can render the entire site unusable when, for instance, you need to click a form button and you can't actually see it because of text size.
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