What web page width is best?

[Karlis]

I used to favor 760px as many were using 800x600, but now I find that 800x600 is used by only 4% of all visitors and decreasing. So we're about to move to 860 - it will give some more space while providing comfortable reserve for 1024x768 users, so that they can work in non-maximized mode.

What resolutions do you use/prefer?

[notuo]

1024 is now the main screen size... go for it

[syrupcore]

What ever works for your users. It's great that you're basing it off of stats.

We're big fans of the 960 grid. http://960.gs/ We rolled our own but that's the basic idea.

[MaxD]

Just as prudent to say 'which max-width is best'. With screens and screen resolutions getting bigger, I've set a maximum width of 1200px. Some say that doesn't work in IE6, but I figure that anyone using IE6 is using an older computer and therefore a smaller screen, and so it won't make any difference.

[joemichaud]

We're big fans of the 960 grid. http://960.gs/ We rolled our own but that's the basic idea.

I am also.

I tend to use either the Yahoo! CSS framework or one called "Blueprint" - both of which support 960px (in Blueprint it's 950px with a 10px gutter). If you are going to widen your site, I think you could feel quite comfortable skipping over 860 if you want to go to 960.

[MaxD]

I think you could feel quite comfortable skipping over 860 if you want to go to 960.

Have 'liquid layouts' gone out of favour due to ever increasing screen sizes? The interest in fixed width is making me think that my next site should be fixed width too. For your info my 5 year old laptop has a 1024px screen, one I got last year has a 1260px screen, and my next will be bigger again (possibly 1400px).

[MikeyB]

I always try to do liquid layouts, i.e. will fit the width of any screen, probably down to a minimum of 1024 these days, used to do 800.

But as I'm rubbish at the actual design of websites (I'm okay at the code behind) I tend to search & download templates, and these days they all tend to be fixed width.

[chrisjlocke]

Fluid width was great for people who had 1024x768 screens, as it meant it looked great on big and small (800x600) screens. However, with widescreen monitors now very common, fluid width sites can cause all sorts of problems. Forums like these for example make reading very difficult with very long lines.

I don't like fixed width sites that are locked to 800px wide screens - so much wasted space either side. Eg:
http://www.freecsstemplates.org/preview/terrafirma

My screen is 1280px wide, and that template looks too squished.

[syrupcore]

+1 on blechy long lines. <600px is where we try to keep it. I feel like liquid layouts need to be able to do more than just stretch things wide.

[Karlis]

syrupcore, sorry for messing up qour post. Somehow I clicked EDIT instead of QUOTE and saved without looking

+1 on blechy long lines. <600px is where we try to keep it. I feel like liquid layouts need to be able to do more than just stretch things wide.

I agree with this so much. Liquid is cool, but making the text stretch in lines that are too long is just so wrong, because shorter lines are so much easier to read. And I know, because there was a study about this and it was actually in my thesis about interface design. Also I have a pretty big widescreen monitor 24" with a screen width of over 1900px, so Liquid pages look very funny when maximized and the text is so difficult to read. MaxWidth could be a solution.

[MikeyB]

Thinking on the last couple of posts, I agree.

Liquid layouts aren't very good with today's high-res monitors, even on the 17" standard (non-widescreen) monitor I use at work set to 1280x1024 web pages that fill the width of the screen are hard to read, and generally I don't have my browser window maximized anyway!

So maybe some kind of liquid layout, but with a maximum width set, so that it can shrink down for smaller screen sizes is the way to go.

[SilverHand]

I think it is best to do in QVGA multiplies. So u give PDA users chance to use your page in clear pixels and on whole display (without x-scrolling), while they resize the page to view all content. So 320,640, 960...etc. So when I am preparing public site I use 960 grid.

Cya Silver