Sizing a website

[Paul Clarke]

Hi Guys,

What is the best advice for sizing a website to suit differant monitor sizes. I am in the process of designing a site which looks good on my wide screen laptop (wasted on me) but looks awful when viewed on smaller monitors. Is there a standard rule of thumb to handle this problem?

Thanking you in advance,

Paul

[tech_support]

I think 1024*768's the bare minimum.
800*600 is extinct, and so is 640*480.

[euphoriastudio]

I'm not a professional by any means, but I usually try to keep my sites around the 800×600 resolution. That way you can target the majority of web surfers. But that is just my opinion.

[Paul Clarke]

Thank you for your speedy and helpful reply. This is not the first time you have taken the trouble to help me out and no doubt it won't be the last.

We need more people likeyou and I am sure that the majority of regs will agree.

Thanking you once again,

Paul

[BLiZZaRD]

800*600 is extinct, and so is 640*480


Be careful there... I would tend to agree with 640*480, but in 2 years of running my site and 4 million visitors, I have seen a TON still using 800*600. I have near blind players, older players and those with just overall bad vision that rely upon 800*600 resolution.

Don't knock it yet.

[Paul Clarke]

Thanks for your advice guys - all of it good. I have decided to go with Blizzard's advicde as the website is for a hospice so there would be a larger percentage than normal of people who might have difficulty dealing with the larger screen resolution.

I found a great script on DD which allows the end user to enlarge or make smaller the text.

The site is currently under development and uploaded to www.hobbyfarmproduce.com so you can see it working (although not on the homepage)

Thanks again for all your time and help.

Paul:)

[BLiZZaRD]

Don't forget that vision impaired persons aren't stupid, they just can't see well. LOL A lot fo designers mistakes is designing the website to "help" people overcome design issues. These people browse everyday. They know that hitting ctrl+ will increase font size through the browser.

Although some small scripts can help, you don't want to make them feel stupid either ;)

[Paul Clarke]

Thanks Blizzard,

You're 100% correct when you point out that vision impaired persons aren't stupid. btw I didn't know about the ctrl+ thingey. As an X patient in a Hospice, one of the big issues there was to preserve the dignity of both patients and their family.

It is too easy as a novice designer to add doo-daas because you can rather than you should.

There is obviously still a lot of work left to do on the site although I hope to go live with it this coming weekend.

The site is a little unusual as it is not designed to attract customers. The five main points we sre trying to get accross are as folllows.


To raise money to build 2 hospices with accommodation for families
To get more volunteers
To let people know that home services are available as well as in-patient services
To enable patients with a life threatening illness to live out the remainder of their lives in comfort and dignity.
To let people know that services are also available for people in long term pain and being in a hospice does not mean you are in God's waiting room.


I am sure you would give it a once over before I publish it to its rightful domain.

Thanking you in advance,

Paul:)

[Twey]

I think 1024*768's the bare minimum.
800*600 is extinct, and so is 640*480.A site should work at any resolution, even if it means disabling images. Don't forget that there's a surge of hand-held Web-capable devices now, whose screens can be 320×300 or smaller.

[tech_support]

Don't forget that there's a surge of hand-held Web-capable devices now, whose screens can be 320×300 or smaller.
That's why they have a seperate CSS file for mobiles.

[Twey]

Shouldn't be necessary really.

[tech_support]

Well, a typical mobile phone would strip out fonts, background images/colours etc. So mine as well create a seperate stylesheet, designed for the mobile, to make it more usable.

[wamsoftware52]

If you really want to be accomodating and have your size look great for most all viewers, you can build several different pages - each built around a specific resolution and setup this handy resolution based redirect script to automatically send the viewer to the appropriate portion of your site (based on their monitor settings). I'm actually in the works of doing this exact same thing myself because I totally understand your frusteration in spending time to make a way cool looking site and having it look crappy on many other machines. http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex9/info3.htm
Hope this helps!

[tech_support]

But that won't work on (some) phones because they have JavaScript disabled.

[Twey]

If you really want to be accomodating and have your size look great for most all viewers, you can build several different pages - each built around a specific resolution and setup this handy resolution based redirect script to automatically send the viewer to the appropriate portion of your site (based on their monitor settings).But both this and the separate stylesheet are both just hacks working around the basic problem of your site being too inflexible.

[Paul Clarke]

You are probably right Twey, but you must remember that there are a lot of people that use this forum, all with varying degrees of knowledge on web design. The "Hack" makes perfect sense to me. I know that I could save myself a lot of time and codeing by taking a differant approach but time constraints do not allow me to reach the level I need.

The site is replacing an old one which is out if date. I do intend once the site goes live to do a total redesign but for now, I'm just up and walkiing. Before I start running, ,I will develop my limited skills.

Thanks for your advice,

Paul