Opions Requested on several things!!

[Jd_Johnson8]

I went to the website: http://www.oswd.org/ just to check it out. And now i have some questions for all of you designers out there...

How important is it that a site design maintain it's design between screen resolutions and user text settings within browsers? (and do you account for all screen resolutions and text sizes - or just focus on the median?)

Which browsers do you all test your sites in before publishing?

And which of the above issues do you place the most value on?

And if this all too broad, lets say that the audience for the site you are designing consists of many industries - such as plastics processing, packaging, and food processing to name a few...

Thanks for the input in advance!

Jd

[Kravvitz]

1) The importance of window-width (http://www.collylogic.com/?/comments/the-importance-of-browser-window-width/)

Senior citizens tend to prefer 800x600 to 1024x768. (http://www.sitepoint.com/article/improve-usability-older-users/)

Scrolling and Scrollbars (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050711.html)

780px is the maximum width for a web page without horizontal scrolling in a web browser maximized at 800x600 screen resolution once you allow for the width of the vertical scroll bar.

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/resolution-dilemma
I would like to point out that using percentages is not the only way to make a flexible design. The author of that article did not mention using min-width and max-width, though using those does require work-arounds to compensate for IE6's lack of CSS2 support.

2) I test in different combinations of the browsers listed here, depending on the type of layout, script, etc. I'm testing. (http://www.dynamicsitesolutions.com/services/) For example if a script requires DOM1 support, I might not bother to test it in IE4, Netscape 4.x, and Opera 6. You should test in as many browsers as you can to assure that your page doesn't look like abstract art.