Uncle Jims Web Designs: Web Site Design Optimization

As the configuration of monitors continues to increase, it becomes nearly impossible to test sites in all screen sizes. Designing stretch layouts that fit any screen resolution ensures that you know all your visitors see a visually appealing and professional site. Of course, this will require you to re-evaluate the content of each page. You may need to split up some of those pages with a multitude of text.

Web Developers having a lot of data to display, usually take advantage of the extra screen area provided by 1024x768 resolution. However this thought process will make you lose your 800x600 visitors. If you design for 1024x768 resolution, you need to ensure you use cascading stylesheets to define virtually everything on your page. Then, you can create a set of stylesheets that will make your pages readable on 800x600 screens. Since everything will be larger, you can make some optimizations, such as shrinking the font.

For example, take a look at this article in various resolutions. You will find that it will fit the various screen widths. For sites with long pages of content, this is crucial as the amount of scrolling required is reduced. If your site doesn't look good in a particular resolution, most likely the visitor will close the browser window.