Erik Akers

Many years ago when I got started in web design, I quickly learned not to design a web page larger then 800px across. Why didn’t you design any­thing big­ger then 800px? Because in those days most were using 15″ mon­i­tors, and a 800X600 res­o­lu­tion, with their com­put­ers and you never wanted vis­i­tors to have to scroll side to side to read your content.

Now days there aren’t that many 15″ 800x600 res­o­lu­tion mon­i­tors out there. In fact, of the web sites I run or review traf­fic for only 2.33% of the vis­i­tors to those sites use that res­o­lu­tion. But still there are some that keep say­ing in web design not to design any­thing big­ger then 800px, which is silly.

I for one am of the feel­ing that some­one using a 15″ mon­i­tor these days should be forced to deal with scrolling side to side to read some­thing. Mon­i­tors are now cheap and you can pick up a good usable mon­i­tor for less then $100.

Finally some sites are mov­ing away from the 800px frame work and have started mov­ing to 960px frame work. YouTube made head­lines in the last cou­ple weeks by chang­ing it’s site to 960px frame work and mak­ing the videos now in widescreen.

I got into design­ing a lot of my sites around 900px to 925px wide, which by no means is a stan­dard size just more some­thing I liked to use so my sites were a lit­tle different.

So why 960px? Well thats because the 1024x768 has replaced 800x600 as the most pop­u­lar screen res­o­lu­tion, and again we don’t want any­one to have to scroll side to side to read content(unless we designed it that way).

I’m sure in a cou­ple of years we will be talk­ing about the 1050 or 1100 frame work that out there because no one uses small 1024x768 mon­i­tors any more. Which is funny because some­times I think that 960px wide to to much space to fill up, but then I like to keep my pages short and to the point.

Just another thing to talk about when start­ing to design a web site, mak­ing sure that it will impact the largest num­ber of vis­i­tors and mak­ing sure every­thing fits on their screen is an impor­tant step to take.