800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024
Recently, the topic of screen resolution came up again while building a website. For the past two or three years, I've followed the philosophy of designing for 800x600, since such a large portion of the Internet audience still used that resolution. But it seems time may be a changin'. This month's stats for screen resolution at TheCounter.com show that there are just as many people in 1280x1024 as there in 800x600 (about 17% each). At 56% usage, 1024x768 is the default, which I've known for awhile.
I've never given much consideration to people viewing in 1280x1024. Most of my sites are fixed width for 800x600, and they look fine in 1024x768, but it is probably time to give the poor small resolution folks less of a say in how I design my websites. I don't want to completely piss 'em off with fixed width sites at 1024x768, but sites that adjust in size are much more difficult to build (and still look nice). Since I already want to test out some new CSS for this site, I'm going to play around with a new design and see if I can't come up with something that is viewable in 800x600, optimized for ideal viewing in 1024x768, and yet stretches to fill up a screen set at 1280x1024.
*cracks knuckles*
This might take a while. Poor 800x600 is going the way of 640x480.