Best screen size for web site.

[Matt]

Agreed. 800x600 is dead. If it's not, lets kill it. Ask yourself, do you need the clients that run those old systems? They probably do not have the money to spend on upgrades, so how are they going to afford your products? If it's not the money, it might be the fear some people have of change. If someone is afraid of change, the web is the wrong business to be in

[charlesh]

It's kinda like trying to code to still put in fixes for ie 5.5. Is it worth it to do so?

[Matt]

It's kinda like trying to code to still put in fixes for ie 5.5. Is it worth it to do so?

Depends on your site I guess. Its sort of a catch 22. If you make it compatible for IE5.5....your stats are going to show more users of IE 5.5 are using the site, which artificially iflates the importance of this browser.

On this site, IE5.5 is not considered as "important" even though as of this writing 40% of our traffic comes from users of that browser.

When developing things I like to use Yahoo's definition of A-Grade browsers.

Yahoo! UI Library: Graded Browser Support

[Matt]

That's a bit harsh, we appreciate all of our clients, even ones who enjoy seeing a bottom scroll bar.

Cheers,
Eric4

Yes I appreciate them too but I am not going to spend time marketing to them and I will already have an experience-based bias that these types of users are probably unable (for monetary reasons) or unwilling (due to laziness or intellect) to learn how to keep up with technology and probably do not excel at things like efficient usage of a computer.

In other words, they are less likely to be power-users or even competent-users thus tying up support times on the most basic of issues, half of which are probably unrelated to web hosting. They will probably cost us more to support than other clients and they will be less willing to pay what they need to pay, to get the job done properly.

This can be problematic when dealing in an Internet service business which by nature is always bleeding edge.

Picking and choosing your clients and sticking in a niche is a far superior way to conduct business than trying to please everyone. My humblest opinion of course.

I'd rather run a shop on Rodeo Drive than run a Wal-Mart any day.

[Christopher]

I just noticed this. Matt if the 800 px wide is dead then why is this forum 800 wide?
I agree that there are many more large screens that handle the wider resolution. With that said I still think that many people don't view at that resolution because the text is too small. On more than one occasion I'll walk into a clients office and they have this wonderful 22 or 24 inch wide screen set to 800 x 600. And the site that I designed for them is super-sized.

[Matt]

I just noticed this. Matt if the 800 px wide is dead then why is this forum 800 wide?

Because my web designer thought it was a good idea 4 or 5 years ago when he deployed the CSS for this part of the site

And yes I have seen that person that you describe with their nice 24 inch monitor set to 800x600 and wonder if they know how to adjust their screen resolution, if they have a really bad video card, or if they are doing it for accessability reasons.

If you notice the trend on the current web, sites are adapting for larger screen sizes and people are starting to realize that tiny text it a real pain to read. Lots of the sites coming our now are using larger fonts so that the page can be read without a magnifying glass. Something we hope to do on the next redesign, whenever that may be.

[Matt]

Maybe someone should start a thread for our webmasters to vote on what their site stats say about their site visitor's most popular screen resolutions?

[rachel404]

800x600 is dead. If it's not, lets kill it. Ask yourself, do you need the clients that run those old systems? They probably do not have the money to spend on upgrades, so how are they going to afford your products? If it's not the money, it might be the fear some people have of change. If someone is afraid of change, the web is the wrong business to be in

Harsh words, but a good point quite frankly. On topic though, we make sure to design all our websites to at least 1024 x 768 specifications. Unless clients want something "fancier", and are okay with losing out to that kind of demographic.

[Matt]

Well, I may retract what I said. When I wrote that the trend was for large monitors and higher resolutions. Now that Netbooks have hit the scene, it has skewed things a bit.

I still do believe that coding for old browsers is a waste of time, but it unfortunately has proven to be necessary. Hopefully technology will change that alleviates some of these problems with multiple browser support problems.

[Sohail Ahmed]

I always set width of web page is 960px...