What screen size to design for?

In general, it's more difficult to build "fluid" websites that scale automatically to the person's computer's screen size when there are a lot of graphics on the page. That's because, unless all the graphics that are on each page are flash/vector graphics, the graphics themselves will not automatically resize. (Although it is true that you can specify the height and width of any graphic, and even use percentages ... when you are showing those graphics at anything other than their original size, you run the risk of them looking really crappy. )

If the site is primarily text and just a few scattered graphics, "fluid" sometimes works nicely, though it's still a little bit tricky to do.

If the site has quite a few graphics, then use "fixed" screen widths.

At work, we design for 1024 x 768 screens.

As you can see from the attached graphics, so does CNN and APPLE. (Although you can see that the CNN screen, when viewed on a 1280x800 screen, actually makes their header at the top fluid, so it fills all the way across. but they specifically -don't- do that for the rest of the site below the header.

I would say, design for a 1024x768 screen, keeping in mind that when you do that, you don't actually have 1024 dots wide to work with, you have less, because some of the screen is taken up by the border of the browser (the scrollbar area on the right, and a few pixels on the left).

Here are a couple of useful links when considering screen size:

Statistics on most common screen sizes:

http://www.zdnetasia.com/techguide/webdev/0,39044903,39370548,00.htm

Why you should design for "browser" size and not screen size:

http://justaddwater.dk/2006/08/17/design-for-browser-size-not-screen-size/


Hope that info helps!