Should I still design for the 800×600 screen resolution?
It’s a tough choice: should we ditch 800×600 screen resolution users? By designing your website width a width of more than 780 pixels (800 pixels screen width minus the browser scrollbar), you are not really ditching these users. However, you are going to make their browsing experience less convenient, since they will have to scroll horizontally, in case your layout doesn’t completely break when resized to a smaller width.
But are there many Internet users that still have a screen resolution of only 800×600? Unfortunately there are, but you can take the decision based on other factors. First, making a fixed width website layout is generally a bad idea, especially if that width is 800 or less. There is too much wasted space when I view such websites on my screen resolutions (1280×1024 or 1600×1200). If you can make a fluid width layout that looks good at 800×600 and also expands nicely at 1280×1024, you’ll have no headaches.
However, from my experience, fluid width that can adjust to fix in a small resolution such as 800×600, doesn’t look so good on 1024×768, 1280×1024 and let’s not even mention larger resolutions. That is when I have to develop the website for a mimimum resolution of 1024×768. I take this decision depending on multiple factors, but the most important one is the target visitors. If these visitors are geeks such as the ones on Geekpedia.com, passionate about technology, I know that most of them will be using 1280×1024 or at least 1024×768 screen resolution, on 17 or 19″ LCDs, even multiple monitors. So the majority wins.
In conclusion, you should make the decision wether or not to design for 800×600 depending on the target visitors and layout type (fixed width or fluid).
Related posts: