steve40 — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 18:16:20 +0000

Follow up to post above. Out of all my site meters, of which I have five.
800 x 600 = 10%, 1024 x 768 is dominate at around 37 - 40%.
One meter has an ungodly mix of about a dozen diffrent resolutions up to 1600 x 1240, with 1280 x 960 dominate, 1024 x 768 runner up. This one is my Blue Ridge home page mater. Total Confusion!.

steve40 — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 21:39:42 +0000

I for one use 800 x 600, I can see 1024. But at 65 it's to much work to climb up on the desk, so I can get close enough.

I see people running 1600, I found a place where you can test your site in a mac browser. It will go to 1600, believe it or not my site held together well. But it took me 5 minutes to just make it across the page.

You would need at least a 25" monitor to run that.

starter — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 17:20:17 +0000

Personally I think depending on what contents we dealing with on particular sites, so far I have avoiding the fuild design altogether, as if my designs were 800x600 I find that its a lot easier and also more consistant to work with, 1024 is the main res at the moment, so I can see why the larger sites have moved on, but most sites never have needs for anything larger then 800x600, with technology moving on everyday and standards changing every now so often, you cant expect to please everyone.

dragonsjaw — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 19:03:53 +0000

I've been struggling with this lately.
I am goung for 1024 on this latest site I am working on,
the client uses an ungodly high res and am having difficulty having a fluid workable site in 800 and 1024, it then falls totally apart on her res.
Interesting topic.
I still like fluid, and run at 1024 myself haven't used 800 in years.
But understand the eye strain thing..
a bigger monitor really helped with that..19" is just perfect for me now.

~dragonsjaw

Busy — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 22:31:00 +0000

A while back there was the big flash craze, everyone had flash ... the wider screen sizes can be the same thing until something new comes along - we make sites for others, if they don't like/aren't able to use them then they will go elsewhere.

Just back to the news thing for a sec, I get newspaper delivered, they had a good format and covered a lot of stuff but recently they changed format - for the worse. My subscription ends at the end of this month and I wont be renewing it, instead will just stick with online news. I'd rather have with print version but reading the paper should be easy not a mission to find anything, the weather with the death notices?

Megan — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 18:48:12 +0000

Megan wrote: I just think that people have some loyalty to certain papers with high reputations. The NY Times isn't any old news site. Especially if people have been reading the paper version for years and years. Something like Google News is certainly not comparable to a regular newspaper.

And, to add to that - a change in one site might be tolerable, since they can swtich to an alternative or make do with the way it is. BUT, what happens when more and more sites start going wider? What if someone was a big news junkie and visited both CNN and the NY Times every day? And there will be other sites that decide to do this. It's that sort of build up that might make people change their settings.

demonhale — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 18:01:10 +0000

I think we shouldnt drop 800x600 just yet... if you can make it work for this res, better, if you absolutely must support only higher res, then its your choice anyways...

Megan — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 14:15:37 +0000

I just think that people have some loyalty to certain papers with high reputations. The NY Times isn't any old news site. Especially if people have been reading the paper version for years and years. Something like Google News is certainly not comparable to a regular newspaper.

Busy — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 13:17:31 +0000

I used to read various news sites then they went all ads and weird sizing so switched to google news

Megan — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 02:04:29 +0000

Busy wrote: If sites stop working for them people will switch sites. With trillions of websites out there you could find what you wanted in nearly any flavour. Look at the thread (can't find it) about online banking, wasn't usable in certain browsers so banks were swapped

It did work for getting rid of Netscape though. And this isn't just any news site we're talking about, this is CNN and the New York Times. There's the whole aspect of reliable news sources to take into consideration. If people are watching CNN all day, they'll want to read the website too. They might even go to greater lengths to do so. I know that it would tkae a lot for me to switch my regular newspaper (it's got a terrible website but I'll put up with it because the cotnent is good).

And who was going to swap banks? That was JeevesBond. Not everyone is like that. Actually, I think a lot of people would put up with the resolution problem until someone showed them how to change it.

___________________________________________

Back to the original question, I think that it might be reasonable to fix widths at 1024 IF you have a really content heavy site (like CNN or the NY Times). However, I wouldn't put important content in that space. It would be good for secondary content areas, special features, things like that. But not key navigation. I don't like the way either of those sites are done, personally. Or, as Tim said, if you were designing for a younger audience or graphic designers or a group you could be sure would run at higher resolutions.

For other sites, there is no reason why you need to use that much space. Flexible works perfectly fine, and stays in tune with the users' needs. I find it kind of odd that some of these usability guru types are fixing their sites at higher resolutions actually. It is harder to do with CSS but who's not up to that challenge?

I do like fixed at 760 or so on sites that don't have a lot of content. Like my personal site for example - it would look too stretched out at higher resolutions because there's not much there. So fixed works well. Although that's probably a heck of a lot of pink on big screens

ETA: my apologies for the sloppy typing!