I am working on creating a web site and am trying to determine what dimensions to use for the pages.

I started with 1200x800 which worked fine on my computer since it is 1280x800 graphics but on computers with 1024x768 cards the site ends up spilling over.

So I need to make it smaller, but am trying to decide how small to go.

800 by 600 seems a bit too small, leaves lots of space from side to side and also ends up with a much bigger empty space on the right than the left on nicer graphics.

Has anyone found a happy medium ?

Or is there a way for it to adjust to work well with all sizes ?

You might find this thread of interest:

http://www.coffeecup.com/forums/website … page-size/

Hi,

That question can be debated forever without anyone agreeing. Most of what I design is based on the audience. If the site is mainly for business users (lap top users, workstations with older/smaller monitors) then the width of 800 makes sense. If you are targeting the home user, desktops with wide screens, a width of 1000 might work fine.
There really is no way to determine the size of every person's monitor. If you did build a dynamic site that sized itself, it could look a real mess on a 15" laptop screen compared to a 30" widescreen LCD!

In my experience, a width of 900 seems to work best. It should fit on most laptops and if you center the web pages you will have even width on both sides.

Take banking websites for example. Most of those are from 700 to 900 wide and they are mostlly aligned to the left of the page. Things will never spill over on the left side, so it's a safe place to put your page. The height really is not important as most everyone knows to scroll down on a web page.

I recently had someone ask me why their website did not fit on their monitor. They had to scroll to the right to see the content. When I checked, they had a 19" monitor with settings of 800 X 600. When I changed the monitor settings, the entire page fit nicely with space to spare. They asked me "how did you fix the website so fast!" Moral of the story is, you can't make your site fit everybody, so design it for your target market the best you can. Too small (width) is ok because everything can be seen. Too wide and you will loose traffic for those who have small monitors or incorrect setting for their monitor.

Just my opinion.

800X600 is the smallest you will have to worry about so 750px wide will suffice.

percentage width will solve this for you but I don't like percentage widths. I prefer fixed widths. This way I know my page will look exactly the same on every monitor (text won't shift).

Can you create a Percentage width page with VSD?

Not that I know of. The software fixes the page size by making it a single-cell table of a fixed size.