Most used resolution setting

[Russ in Vancouver]

Hello, I am building a new website and my goal here is to get my main header and a main message visible to the viewer as soon as my site opens up in their browser, without them having to scroll down to see the bottom of a chart.
Does anyone know what is the most common screen resolution these days?
My market is home owners between the ages of 30-50. Average value of their home is approx. $250K-850K

thanks

[vangogh]

Most common resolution is becoming a thing of the past given all the devices people can now use to access your site. Here's a post I wrote on developing a flexible layout.. The posts talks you through both 2 and 3 column layouts and it links to some demos you can use to get you started.

That alone though doesn't cover people using various mobile devices. To have your site work well across all those devices you want to follow the practices of responsive design.

Having said the above if you're just looking to create a fixed-width layout that works for the most people you should still be safe aiming for 1024x768. 1200px width might have passed it as the most common, but 1024 is still the best bet for a fixed design. You want to account for the browser chrome like the scrollbar. 984px is common as is 960px. The latter because it can be made to work easily with several grids.

Check my post on flexible (elastic) layouts. It's easy enough to set up and I even gave you the code to get started.

[Russ in Vancouver]

Thanks VG

I appreciate your awesome replies

[jamestl2]

For a fixed layout as such, what I might consider designing for is making the width 800px, then just centering that main wrapper, so smaller resolutions aren't missing out on anything, and a horizontal scroll bar wouldn't appear at the bottom of the page for them. Although I'm not sure of the actual percentage of users that use that smaller resolution.

Of course there's other factors to consider too, like the overall design of the site, what it's being developed for, etc.

[vangogh]

I wouldn't go for 800px exactly. Even if you're going for 800x600 you still have to account for the browser chrome, which accounts for something like 26px(?). At this point though I wouldn't go with fixed-widths any more. The techniques are there to at least make create a flexible layout. It's no harder than creating a fixed width site.