One of the main decisions a web designer has to make when designing or re-designing a website is whether or not to use a fixed width, say 780 pixels, or a fixed percentage, say 80% for the website’s width.

Most of the time, when I’m starting a site I tend to lean towards the fixed pixel width of 780px. However, on screens with a large resolution this can sometimes look a bit thin. A workround would be to use some Javascript to sniff out the screen resolution and load a different stylesheet for set resolutions, but there’s a problem for people who switch Javascript off.

On the other side of the coin, a fixed width percentage of say 80% looks very wide on high screen resolutions and can make your content look very thin on the ground. A solution for this problem could be to use the max-width setting, but you’d have to hack it to work in Internet Explorer.

So the conclusion?
It all depends on your content. If you have a lot of it and it would expand to 80% of a large screen resolution and still look ok, then that could be the choice for you.

If you have minimal content, then a fixed width of 780px (or less) could be the choice for you. The reason I choose 780px is because on a screen resolution of 800×600, you don’t get horizontal scroll bars.

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