What screen resolution do you design for?

theSCIENTIST wrote: Yeah the Portuguese issue on the site was also major and first time for me, even thou it's my native language, I'm having some dificulty making the translation sometimes, English terms rock. I asked them for material, but they don't seam interested, I'll do the flashy things and upload script (almost finished) and job done. Your site is nice also, you are using DotNetNuke which is quite nice, but it uses Javascript for navigaton, and since my Internet Zone is set to high, I can't see it, only if I add your site to my Trust Area, Javascript is great for client side validation but relying on it for navigation can cause problems with security conscious clients like me.

Yes, it's DNN. And I hate that the navigation doesn't self-deprecate to plain jane HTML. I still haven't done any design for the site at all - it's the default (which is actually very attractive). I want to fix that once I have time, but that's the problem at the moment - zero time. Once I get around to actually doing some design and skinning the site, I want to program a navigation module that returns pure HTML. Navigation should never use javascript or flash, IMHO.  

My reason for using DNN is that it is super-flexible, easy to use, and I can focus on the content (my programs) and not web programming. It does have its drawbacks though.

I figure that with the massive amount of flash and javascript on the net, and larger monitor screens now, I'm not really catering to people with low-end computers or older systems, so I take liberties that really wouldn't be appropriate on a site that has a larger target audience, like a search engine or portal site. My site is basically for programmers, musicians, and computer enthusiasts. e.g. Some pages don't render well at 800x600.

As for security, I don't worry about it too much because I don't visit the seedier side of the internet and I keep my OS up to date with security patches. I also use Firefox a lot, so IE exploits aren't a worry.

dpyers wrote: steve wrote: I'd really love it if everybody used 1280x1024 minimum though...wishful thinking I know... I use 1600x1200 on my dev machine, and 1024x768 on notebooks or client sites. But I don't do anything full screen. I got that1600x1200 screen to view many windows - not just one. The average size browser window on my dev machine is usually in the 800x600-1024x768 range. I think that people using higher the screen resolutions are less likely to use it full screen and more likely to use it for multiple, smaller, windows.

Seems to me that the state of web design is pretty low tech at the moment compared to what it could be with the existing technology available.

There is a lot you can do client side, but when you look at most sites, they all do things server side on different pages. Part of that is probably due to bandwidth and speed too though.

With what you can do inside the DOM with DHTML, there are just too many possibilities. Javascript does run slow though, which is a bit sad.

What I'm trying to get at is that you could really do some fantastic things at 1600x1200 - that's a lot of screen geography.