800x600 vs. 1024x768

[Coolviper1985]

I've been designing sites for a while at 800x600 but reading over the forms I find it more often than not people are starting to default to a higher resolution.

If I were to go a notch up I would take the jump to 1024x768.

For the argument I took sites like:

http://google.com
http://apc.com

Both are still using the 800x600 layout centered with a white background.

Some sites try to make both happy by using a repeating background thus filling all the white space.

Although if you take a look at sites like these:

http://ibm.com
http://ebay.com

Both take the left aligned site layout and still rely on the white background.

With so many big names choosing to still cater to the ever ding crowd of 800x600 with a plain old white background what is a emerging designer supposed to do?

If you stick with the so called standard and it eventually changes you may end up redoing all the sizing again at a later date.

Then again that may mean more money down the road ;)

I guess in the end it’s all up to the artist themselves to decide what best fits their individual client.

So the main point is to get an idea of how most of you feel towards layout.

Left, Right, Centered, White, Black, Gray it’s up to you so surprise me.

Hopefully we can turn it into a stressful heated debate :p

-Lucas

[Dabrowski]

It wouldn't be a stressful, heated debate that didn't occur in several other threads in recent history:)

Look at the PowWeb forums--it's designed for any resolution (as best as that task can be accomplished, anyway), and I think it pulls it off well, however, for a person who is very particular about their design, there are only a few site types that will be so flexible. Forums, article sites, etc. are easy to use 100% widths so everything stretches.

Typically, I don't fall into that category, so I tend to opt for the roughly 740px width, and center things. The left-justified isn't bad, but it draws the attention to the edge of the screen, in my opinion, a little too much. I also prefer to have a reasonably dark background color or image for the dead space, and work in brighter tones in the middle (ex. http://www.TradCat.com, http://www.Terrapin-K9.com <-- click in a bit to see my point).

The only flaw in this method is also a minor, nit-picky thing that only I worry about. When there is not enough content to generate a scroll bar, the page centers slightly differently than when there is a scrollbar. It causes a MINIMAL jarring effect, but based on my prior experience, I doubt anyone notices.

As far as changing all of your old work, if they're your own projects, obviously you can choose to redesign them at will. Hopefully, with CSS and structured design, you won't really have to change much. If they are clients' sites, I doubt that one day you'll get an influx of customers beating down your door saying, "Lucas! No one uses 800x600 anymore! Change it--FAST!" And if you do, heh, yeah it will cost them. But that's not your fault.

Just start thinking about it now and try to keep the elements flexible. Maybe if you want to switch someday, you can just edit one parameter per site!

Finally, just on a speculatory note, I would wonder how many 1024x768 users are already used to seeing a little whitespace on their screen. If a site was to fill the whole thing, would they be like, "Hey, is my resolution messed up?"

And really finally, sure we're dealing with a trend of people using higher resolutions. Does that mean that people's eyes are getting better? Maybe corrective lens technology is, and people are using contacts for longer periods of time, or something. Maybe this trend will continue until people trash their eyes worse, and then it will actually move back towards lower resolutions. What do you think about that?

[Mirzabah]

The W3C Schools demographic has a much higher proportion of early adopters and should only be used as a yardstick if your site is tech-focused.

[Dabrowski]

Yeah, forgot to note that Google was fluid.

I agree to some extent. Any site can be fluid, however, using fluid designs on many sites can not achieve 100% stylistic consistency, or display. It's a very minimal issue to some, but it's indisputable that the longer the lines of text, the harder they are to read. If you would like to optimize a site to be easily scannable, I truly don't believe that just making everything full-width is the answer. It requires a more structured design. And some might find extra whitespace within the content that could be caused by fluid design to be ugly. I prefer to put the whitespace (or darkspace, as the case may be) on the outside and keep my content tight and scannable.

I have yet to see a site that uses full-width, fluid design and doesn't sacrifice ANY design quality or some degree of usability.

[Coolviper1985]

Fluid is a good idea and yes it can be more work but its after a mean between all users and brings your site together for a more professional look IMO.

I'm a big fan of white backgrounds one thing that I like to do is have a soft repeating background pattern on the sides to give it some taste but as far as content I can't stand reading it on anything but white.

Then again I could just be old and plain :D

-Lucas

[rdmorss]

And really finally, sure we're dealing with a trend of people using higher resolutions. Does that mean that people's eyes are getting better? Maybe corrective lens technology is, and people are using contacts for longer periods of time, or something. Maybe this trend will continue until people trash their eyes worse, and then it will actually move back towards lower resolutions. What do you think about that?
Perhaps they are like me and are adjusting their font sizes to make them readable at the higher resolution.

When I replaced my CRT monitor with a flat panel LCD I found that the display (especially the fonts) looked really muddy at 800x600 (the resolution I had used on my CRT). Also, the aspect ratio was out of whack since my LCD monitor's native resolution is not a multiple of 4x3. Graphics appeared squeezed or stretched in one direction.

I switched to the native resolution of 1280x1024. Result: super crisp display, clean fonts, and correct aspect ratio for graphics. But of course the fonts were tiny and pretty much unreadable on many websites.

Answer: increase the font sizes in my operating systems (XP and KDE) and in each of the programs I use. So I now have a high-res screen with readable fonts.

The exception - I noted that my larger font preferences sometimes made a website unreadable, as the larger fonts created overlapping lines where they couldn't squeeze into the space allotted them by the website layout (i.e. where the website wanted maybe an 8pt or 10pt font and I was displaying it at 14pt to make it large enough to read).

This has caused me to rethink my pixel-based font styles.

Lately I've been working with percents for layout (instead of pixels); ems, percents, and keywords for font sizes (instead of pixels or points).

It seems that pixels are OK for layout as long as the 'box' automatically expands vertically with font changes. Also, the 'line-height' style spec should be relative to the font size - not set to a specific pixel or point value.

Keywords for font sizes are not consistent across browsers, so I'm trying various settings of percents and ems. Ah the joys of CSS and browsers differences!

I think the more you trend toward accessibility, the more you need a fluid layout.

Thanks for reading.

[YvetteKuhns]

All of the computers here are set at 800x600 screen resolution. I have eye strain from too many hours at the computer, image editing and reading tiny fonts on other websites that cannot be resized. My husband is much older (54) and wears bifocals. He cannot read text at higher resolutions. My son is in second grade and also prefers 800x600 for reading. Most of my clients are over fifty years old and prefer 800x600 screen resolution. Many have older monitors, too.

I have used fluid design for years, making sure that sites look good in 800x600 and will still fill the screen in higher resolutions. Unless your target audience is mostly techies or gamers who like higher resolutions, you should still remember that ALOT of people use 800x600. The surveys are not specific to any target audience in particular.

As for positioning, I usually center the contents, but not the text. The web page design looks best in the center of the screen most of the time.