What width should I design my web pages?

There are 2 basic approaches to designing your web pages:

Use a fixed width

But what width? All computer screens have a resolution in pixels (px), this is quite independent of the monitor size and will have a big effect in how your user views your page.

Arguably the most common screen resolution is 800px wide by 600px tall. So you may decide to design your page optimised for this resolution, to do this make your page no wider than 760 pixels (the other 40 pixels will be used by scroll bars, and the other parts of the browser "chrome") [see http://www.bbc.co.uk].

However we are making the assumption that your user has the browser maximised to their screen resolution. Often this won't be the case, and they may have their history or search window open at the left, reducing the viewable width. You should also consider that users may want to print your pages, in which case you should design no wider than 600 pixels or your page will print off the edge of the paper [see http://www.netobjects.com].

If you choose to design to these limited widths, users with high resolution monitors may see a large empty space at the right of screen, you could choose to disguise this with a graphic or centre the page which reduces the impact of the extra space.

Design for percentage widths

In this case you design your page for 100% (or 80% or whatever) to fill the width of the browser regardless of how it is sized. This is sometimes known as liquid design because it "flows" to fill the available space. This has the advantage that it should always render on any browser width and will print on any size paper. The disadvantage is that it is considerably more difficult to achieve. In Fusion you'd use a zeromargin masterborder and check "size layout to text" & "contents wrap to browser width" on the properties palette. All objects must then be placed inside that text box.

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