Design for 640x480 Screen Resolution

In general, make sure that your entire Web site is viewable on a 15-inch screen at a resolution of 640x480 pixels.

Many Web designers have discovered from their site log files that 80-90% of users set their screen resolution to 800x600 pixels. As such, they fix the table widths to use up the entire width of the page.

What they are forgetting is that millions of Web users use popular utilities such as "Alexa" search and the "Search" and "Related" function built into the Internet Explorer browser.

These utilities usually take up about 20% of the left side of a browser window, which reduces the main browser window, where the Web page is displayed, to about 640 pixels on a 800x600 pixel resolution screen. It's actually slightly less when you take into account the right scroll bar.

As a result, Web pages that use fixed width tables often take up more room than the width of the main browser window, hiding the right side of the Web page. To view, users have to scroll horizontally, which is annoying.

WebTV's Screen Resolution Limitation >>>