What should the width of a website be?

[OM2]

What should the width of a website be?

I used to design so that the max width was 780 - to cater for 800x600 resolution viewers

But, what's the next one up from this if you don't want to care of 800x600 viewers?

Thanks


OM

[Haze1434]

I tend to make the width 900px to cater for 1024 width users in this case.

This gives a little space either side for some empty space, but not too much. Most designers like to use this space to add a shadow or a background that sits center, top.

[Charles]

It shouldn't be anything. The web site should work well on any size monitor and well when there is no monitor at all. If you have trouble with this then you need a different medium; paper, perhaps.

[Haze1434]

Charles is correct, of course.

Liquid layouts, or in rare cases elastic layouts, will suit much better to the majority of users.

Although some design elements won't work well with liquid layouts, websites should be designed with as many people in mind as possible, including all screen sizes.

For layouts that absolutely need to be fixed and would not work as liquid, the way you were doing it before at 780px width, centered, would be best.
Else you are creating a problem for short-sighted users that use 800x600 monitors, which is technically going against the w3c accessibility stuff.

In the end though, it is entirely up to the designer.

There are a lot of sites out there that still use fixed size layout of above 800px width, so it can work but just keep in mind that you may lose out on some of your audience.

[kiwibrit]

It shouldn't be anything. The web site should work well on any size monitor and well when there is no monitor at all. If you have trouble with this then you need a different medium; paper, perhaps.

I don't go a long with that. A fully-fluid site on my 1920 x 1200 screen can look rather odd - I prefer a max-width of 960 px - but then I am confident that the vast majority of my web visitors will be using at least 1024×768.

[JTweedie]

I don't like fluid websites either; there are a lot of design limitations, and it creates a lot of hassle making sure things look good on big screens as well as small ones. This website looks ok with a fluid layout, but it's not exactly eye-catching design is it?

I used to make my pages 750px wide, but now that larger screen resolutions are becoming more common I've stepped up to 900px. I occasionally use 750 if a particular website doesn't have much content to fill out the page.

I never actually asked anyone what width was best to use for a website; I worked out 750, because I decided 150px was a good width for a nav-bar button, and it's pleasant on the eye if you have odd numbers of horizontal elements, so 5x150 gave me 750. Then I moved up to 900px by adding an extra 150, but I didn't start using even numbers of nav-buttons; I just found different ways to present odd numbers.

[cfajohnson]

I don't go a long with that. A fully-fluid site on my 1920 x 1200 screen can look rather odd - I prefer a max-width of 960 px - but then I am confident that the vast majority of my web visitors will be using at least 1024×768.

A fully fluid site should also include a max-width for at least some of the elements. That way, it will work for you, too. (See http://cfajohnson.com/about/, http://woodbine-gerrard.com, for example).