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Designing websites is both fun and frustrating. The fun part is the creative side of site design that allows us to do some interesting things. The frustration aspect is developing non-javascripted sites that fit within the majority of screens in use today. The minimum resolution expected of a home user's PC screen has increased from the very old 800x600 resolution to 1024x768. This provides us with an acceptable minimum resolution and is something that we can cope with. But as time moves on that 1024 resolution is wearing thin.

Widescreens are a nice jump in resolution size and offer more real estate to wrap a site design around. Prices continue to fall on these beauties and people are snapping them up. When was the last time you saw a CRT being sold in your local computer store? However, trying to design a site today wider than 1024px can alienate people visiting that site that either don't have a graphics card or computer that displays higher resolutions or have yet to purchase a widescreen. Sure you can modify your design dynamically using javascript but what does your site look like on a browser with javascript disabled? Uh huh, that's what I thought.

To design a site and make it visually appealing to the majority of people surfing the web today still requires that the site be designed with an eye towards that 1024x768 resolution. I was reminded of this again recently when one of our own developed sites' had exceeded it. It wasn't that the site didn't look beautiful (of course it was!) it was that the site was 3 pixels too wide! I hear you saying now - who cares, it doesn't make that much of a difference! Well, yes it does!

To understand why, you need to realize that your website needs to fit as much as possible within the browser window in order to capture your visitors attention as quickly as possible. Those 3 extra pixels caused the browser to display the bottom scroll bar (you know, the one that you scroll left and right when a website won't fit into the browser window without scrolling). That scroll bar was eating into our website space and we weren't too happy about it. Fortunately, we noticed this mid-way through the development phase and made some slight modifications necessary to keep that pesky scroll bar at bay.

In the perfect world, everybody on the planet will have widescreen monitors with javascript enabled browsers and 1 gig connections to the Internet! But when you factor in our current economy, third world nations, and the number of people still not quite computer literate enough to know what they're missing, will still be stuck at good ol' 1024x768 for a while longer.

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