800x600 is so 1997
Whenever I create a new web site, or redo the look of an existing one, I always work with an 800x600 size canvas. This is important, and also something I wish I didn't have to do. I keep the resolution on my computer at 1280x1024, which gives me a fair amount of space on my desktop, and also reduces the amount of scrolling I do. But, some people keep their screen resolution at 800x600. My parents do this even with a brand new computer with a 17" monitor. It does make things easier to read, but on most sites it means a lot of scrolling not only down, but to the right as well.

An 800x600 resolution setting used to be the default for home computers back in the day, but at least within my circle of friends, that hasn't been the case for some time. Nonetheless, if I'm going to make a site, I try to keep the content within the 800x600 window. There might be a need to scroll down, but I definitely want to keep my pages less than 800 pixels wide. Scrolling to the right sucks. Of course, keeping to this size limits what I can do with my designs, and a lot of major sites seem to have given preference to a larger canvas at the cost of forcing some of their visitors to constantly scroll right and left, up and down. If I were creating an art site, or a site geared to those who are a bit more technical I'd expand the size I'm working with, but so far everything needs to fit within this limitation. Often my designs will expand to higher resolutions, but it's key that they at least fit the 800x600 size.

Lately I've been working on an updated front page for my apartment site that makes it more friendly not only to being a template that fits every school I do a site for, but also something that is more friendly to advertisers. I like the design that has been on the site for the last 5 years now, and I think it still doesn't look dated, but it doesn't work too well as a template nor is it advertiser friendly. Fitting everything within an 800x600 area has been a challenge for this new design, but I think I finally have something that's easy to use, functional, advertiser & template friendly and looks good. So the homepage should have a new look by sometime next week. In the meantime I thought I'd share a file that I created. It's a GIF that I set as my desktop background and allows me to know exactly how much of the screen users with other resolution settings get to see. You can download it here: screen-sizes.gif
- posted by Drew @ 1:36 PM