Topic: How wide should I make my site?
I'm completely re-doing my site and was wondering what would be considered a good width.
1 2005-05-10 14:45 (edited by almost_there 2005-05-10 16:20)
Re: How wide should I make my site?
If you're going for a fixed-size design, you should keep the width at around 750px. That way, it'll look good on any monitor using 800x600 and above.
Re: How wide should I make my site?
It's not fixed though, it's in percentage.
- Connorhd
- Former PunBB Developer
- Offline
Re: How wide should I make my site?
percentage is a bad idea imo, you don't get the neatness of a fixed width at high res, and you get a squashed site at low res
Re: How wide should I make my site?
I settled on 85% as a compromise. Not too wide and not too narrow. Shouldn't force horizontal scrolling on lower res and shouldn't leave too much empty space on higher res. Now I can start tweaking the text. Thanks for the input 
- Connorhd
- Former PunBB Developer
- Offline
Re: How wide should I make my site?
Not too wide and not too narrow. but its different widths on different res? 
Re: How wide should I make my site?
If your site doesn't use all space it should be a fixed width. If you're using fixed width you should make decide it upon the information on your site. Long text is easiest to read with a ~500px width. Then add onto that for menus and etc. If you don't use much text you should make it as wide as you need to make it easy to navigate. Not too narrow, but not too much space. So by asking us about what width you should use, we can just make wild guesses.
Re: How wide should I make my site?
You should also bear in mind that Firefox is not entirely happy with percentage widths, borders etc have a habit of vanishing. If you are going to style with css then fixed width is much easier.
Re: How wide should I make my site?
But with fixed width of 750 it looks okay on 800x600 but with higher res, it looks too narrow.
Connorhd wrote:
Not too wide and not too narrow. but its different widths on different res?
Yes, 85% of the width of the screen.
Paul wrote:
You should also bear in mind that Firefox is not entirely happy with percentage widths, borders etc have a habit of vanishing. If you are going to style with css then fixed width is much easier.
Yes it uses css but the css validates and the pages also validate xhtml 1.0 strict. I tested in IE 6, FF 1 and Opera 8.0. It looks basically the same through all 3 browsers at resolutions ranging from 800X600 thru 1280X1024. I just need to do some things with the fonts.
Re: How wide should I make my site?
almost_there wrote:
But with fixed width of 750 it looks okay on 800x600 but with higher res, it looks too narrow.
The content will look the same, therefor, there won't be any space in the content that will make it more difficult to navigate. And keep in mind also that many people with high resolution don't run their browser in fullscreen, that's why using 100% width is always better so the user can chose the width himself.