The subject of designing for screen resolutions has always been a point of contention, but the trend these days does seem to be designing web sites for 1024×768 and above, even with fluid layout sites. It’s almost de-facto and rarely questioned. But is it right?
Here at IPC we’ve always gone with a compromise - go wider, but still design for 800×600 in a way. The trick is to keep the core content within about 780px and have a few ‘non essential’ elements hanging off on the right - see NME.com as an example. It’s a balance between getting more space (and more ads!) above the fold, and catering for the lowest common denominator - my gut feeling has always been they’re not such a minority.
So I thought i’d test my gut feeling and look at the stats for a range of our sites (Horse and Hound, Web User, NME, Wallpaper, Whats On TV, and Nuts), and here are the results:
Only 12.5% of visitors have an 800×600 screen resolution - BUT 21.5% of visitors have an actual browser width of 800px or less.
My theory has been that a surprisingly large number of people surf with their sidebars open - eg their bookmarks or history - my Dad included. I would guesstimate this to be as high as 50% across the board.
So despite the vast majority now having a decent resolutionof 1024px and above (640×480 is practically zero these days, thank God), a size-able proportion - higher than FireFox’s market share - won’t appreciate any content being out wider than 800px. For example, the redesigned telegraph.co.uk homepage:
As with most things on t’interweb, it all comes down to graceful degradation, or even better progressive enhancement. Bare it in mind please!
Oh. My. God. For anybody who has been fearing we are approaching dotcom boom 2.0, here is the definitive proof. I randomly went to boo.com (the famous dotcom failure which managed to burn $120 million in six months) and discovered that a new site is “launching soon”. Argh! 
