Old Developer with Old Question

Question

Hi All,
Used to spend a lot of time here, but had kids and haven't done a web site in 4 years. I'm developing a new site for my husband's new business and I'm wondering what size I should make the pages. We used 800px wide and usually made the pages 100% tall to adjust to content. I know monitors have gotten sharper and I'm wondering if pages are still being developed at 800 because of printing issues.
I REALLY don't want to get into creating more than one site for different browsers or monitors sizes and I don't want to deal with javascript to detect browser size either. I'm happy to just go with the basic size that most are using.
Would appreciate any help,
Marti

Answer 1

Resolution is not the critical issue. Browser viewport width is. To make
your decision you need to have some ideas about the following issues -
1. What is the primary target demographic for this site?
2. What are the browsing habits of that demographic? Do they normally have
their browser window maximized on the screen?
3. If they usually have their browser maximized, what is the typical screen
width?
4. If they usually do NOT have their browser maximized, what is the MINIMUM
screen width in that demographic.
5. How do I want to build the page?
a. Fixed width and left aligned?
b. Fixed width and centering?
c. Flexible to fill whatever width from left to right?
d. Flexible (within limits) and left aligned?
e. Flexible (within limits) and centering?
As you can see, this decision is probably much more complex than you
thought, and will require that you know quite a bit about your intended
target visitor and their browsing habits.
If you elect to go with 5a, or 5b, then your decision would be - 'what is
the mimimum browser width I want to support without horizontal scrolling?'.
Once you have determined that minimum supported width, all of your decisions
are made. That's how wide you want your page to be.
If you elect to go with 5c, then you just build your page within a flexible
container (the simplest example - although an obsolet one - would be to use
a 100% width table to hold the entire page). Be aware that pages with
limited text content can look VERY sparse and empty on wide viewports when
built in this way.
If you elect to go with 5d, or 5e, then you would add this sophistication to
your decision matrix -
'what is the greatest width I want to allow the page and its contents to
become?'
In this case, you would use the CSS styles - 'min-width' and 'max-width' on
the primary page container. Just so you'll know, although these styles are
well supported *now*, earlier versions of IE (and some other browsers) will
not support them so reliably.
So - which is it? 8)
> 100% tall
This cannot be easily done on a page that validates. In other words, most
people who say they do this are using invalid HTML to do so. Forget about
worrying about page height - it is what it is.
> I REALLY don't want to get into creating more than one site for different
> browsers or monitors sizes and I don't want to deal with javascript to
> detect browser size either. I'm happy to just go with the basic size that
> most are using.
You'd REALLY not want to do this. It's a waste of time, effort, and
neurons.
> I'm wondering if pages are still being developed at 800 because of
> printing issues.
This would have nothing to do with it at all. Just slap a print stylesheet
in the pages to handle that eventuality. To read more about this, go here -
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/goingtoprint/
Murray