Be clever and design a fluid layout looks good in anything from 800x600 to 1600x1200

 

fluid layouts do not look good at 1600x1200 or even 2560 x 1600 for that matter.

I either go fluid or design for 1000px wide, but usuable on a 800x600 display.

 

As of 2005, a quarter of web users still used 800x600. They project that will go down to 20% by the end of 2006.

 

Based on some recent web stats for my customers, around 5% of people still use 800x600 and you can probably guarantee that these are the people that'll phone and complain if they need to horizontally scroll.

 

I design for 800x600

 

how do you go about creating a fluid layout as you say?

 

What fluid websites are you talking about?

I know plenty of sites that look fine at 1600x1200.

 

use % inits in your CSS (instead of px, px, em etc...)

 

examples???

 

If you're going for a fixed width design, then designing for 1024 width is relatively safe these days. Lots of people are moving that way, but for widest support you still need to consider those on lower resolution.

The current trend for fixed 1024 designs seems to be to either place some less important content on the right-hand side column [doesn't matter if it's offscreen], or implement the right-hand content so it reflows down to the bottom of the page on lower resolutions [i.e. a fluid layout within a fixed width].

 

These forums themselves
http://www.clearleft.com
http://www.ebay.co.uk

 

Design using percentages - as the user resizes their window, the content resizes with it.

If you'd like to have it be fluid up to a point, you can make use of CSS's max-width property, something like:

Code:

body { width:75%; max-width:40em; }

 

also consider your taget audience. If your doing a website on pc games or anyhting technical then your main audience will be high end users or at least have a desent set up so will not be viewing in 800x600 anyway.

If your doing a website on 'Frank's Vegtable Patch' then you may find some old timers wanting to see the site and are still using their 'brand new' PC bought in 1994.

 

I wouldn't say thats a contributing factor, any genre of site will fit on at 800 width if designed correctly.

 

well depending on your design layout, sometimes you have to change your initial look if catering for 800x600 viewers. And if the site is aimed at high end users then you would have no 800x600 visitors anyway.

But yeah ideally you should cater for them too. I can't see the 800x600 layout being phased out like the 640x480 viewers were as 1024x768 is too small for people with bad eye sight.