Website size question

[Sev]

This has been bothering me lately. I've been wanting to design my own website, but i was wondering what the average size of a site should be?

It occurred to me when I worked from one computer to another and noticed the difference in resolution to be pretty big. With my home computer i find it hard to work with less than 1200x800 resolution, and when I went to my friends house his was at about 1600x1000 (because he has a pretty big widescreen monitor)

Obviously since it was a bigger screen the website design i had come up with just got a bigger background, but it looked fine. What I'm worried about is, are there people who still use 800x600, because when I tried that out, it was freakishly huge, and had to do alot of scrolling ._.;

So on average, what size would you suggest a website should be?

[Wickham]

There have been lots of discussions on this. If you are designing for the general public, many will still be using 800*600 old computers so it's best to use that size, but if you are designing for viewers that you think will have modern computers, I suggest 1024*768.

Many professional sites seem to make the main content 800 px wide and then have ads or contact details or other less important info filling the space at the right to 1024 or 1280 px wide so that a person with 800 x 600 still sees the important stuff and viewers with larger resolutions don't have a blank space. This WebDev page looks very similar with links on the right, the page is in fact flexible with a minimum of about 900px but you could fix the width so that the main information fits a 800px width with less important info further right.

You can use min-width and max-width and perhaps set min-width at 780px width and max-width at say 1180px (allowing 20 px for a vertical scrollbar in 800 and 1200px wide resolutions).

http://www.wickham43.supanet.com/tutorial/maxminwidth.html

See these topics:-

http://www.webdevforums.com/showthread.php?t=17971&highlight=800

http://www.webdevforums.com/showthread.php?t=17362&highlight=800