Making websites viewable in any resolution!

[cturland]

Hi all,

I've always struggled to make my websites compatiable with all resolutions and screen sizes. I normally recommend that my web-sites are viewed in 1024x768 on the opening screen, but I do not think that is very professional.

How do web-sites make their pages viewable in any resolution?

Carl

ps. I realise I could check the screen size in javascript and divert to either a 800x600 or 1024x768 version, but surely there is an easier way?!

 

[mithrilhall]

Well, not all websites make their pages viewable in any resolution. Some create the page for viewing in 800x600 (which is one of the more common and smallest resolution settings).

Just look at this page. I'm viewing it in 1024x768 and I have a huge amount of white space on the right side of the screen. Now if I looked at this page in 800x600 resolution that white space would be gone. Also, if I viewed this page at a higher resolution than 1024x768 there would be a ton of white space.

 

[Bananas]

You can use Tables with the width set to 100% so it expands/contracts to fill the screen width no matter what the person has their display settings at.
But doing that can be a nightmare making sure it does in fact look acceptable at the various options of 640, 800, 1024 or even wider.
According to

http://www.echoecho.com

the statistics are 800x600: 53%, 1024 x 768: 32%, 640 x 480: 5% + the others making up the other ten percent between them.
Most people (inc. me and this site) seem to design to a fixed width to fit just inside 800, the 32% at 1024 wide will get a bit of space at the right, the 5% at 640 wide will have to scroll a bit. Joe Bananas

http://www.therealperth.com

An independent guide to Perth, Scotland

 

[xscape]

I found that by putting stuff in tables and using %'s as the cell sizes it seems to look pretty similar on different screen res's. EG, The table is 100% and the left and right cells something like 15% each and the center cell 70%. The main page content could go in the center cell. This seems to work pretty nicely, although I've noticed Netcape and IE handle percentages a bit differently. The 70% cell will look narrower on IE than Netscape. A bit strange but that's browsers for ya!