When I started designing WordPress Themes for the first time, my machine was set to 1024 x 868. 
If you look at my designs like “FastTrack“, “GreenFlower” etc, you would see that they are designed for people using 800 x 600 resolution.
Recently I saw a post titled Blog Re-themeing on some website. The owner of that website moved away from FastTrack as he felt it is “too narrow”.
I would like to ask you people for your opinions. Are we at a point where we can safely ignore the 800 x 600 and start designing for 1024 x 768 resolution?
Please pour in your thoughts.
Thanks.
I prefer the larger size too, but think that almost all pages should be designed where you can easily shrink them to 800 x 600. … My laptop is set at 1680 x 1050. I usually shrink stuff down to take up about half of the screen width so that I’m not switching back and forth between windows.
Whenever I run across a site that forces me to keep the window more than 50% wide – I try to find the info somewhere else.
With the popularization of the new netbooks ultraportables we must still stick to smaller width designs (like 800×600). I wouldn’t drop it anytime soon. It’s a pain in the neck to still be designing like this, but a lot of people still has smaller resolutions, or laptops, or mobile devices (not cellphones, but these UMPC which don’t run a mobile but a full desktop OS).
But as I always say, it’s up to the target audience. Your people’s stats will help determine this and most (if not all) other considerations. Maybe your users still have smaller screens, each project’s target may vary.
I would encourage developers not to quit designing for smaller screens.
Hi !
I came to this page while I was searching .. ^-^
I think the best designer who makes his design flexible to all people, and with all resolution and browsers.
So your site will be the confluence for all people.
Also, I think this resolution (800 * 600) is very small to see all the page clearly!
Thats what I thougt ! nice site &
Best Regards,
I think there is no necessity to design for 800 x 600 any more and start designing 1024 x 768
Keep up the great work Sadish
thanks
800 x 600 design is ok,but i will try 1024 x 768 in my blogs.
thanks
I use MistyLook on my site which is optimized for 800×600. One could easily agree that 800×600 is a very outdated resolution — everyone uses 1024×768+ or 1280×800+ widescreen nowadays (Mine is 1440×900). However I think that with all the handheld and embedded devices that are beginning to flood the market they could easily produce a 5% share of all the visits — think of iPhones, Nokia Internet tablets, even the newest generation smartphones have a 800×480 resolution – a resolution which in my opinion won’t increase because of the physical limits, even if the resolution increases further we would still experience a wave of DPI increase — an effect which we are already beginning to observe on notebook computers — you can’t read text normally on a 14″ TFT at full HD resolution and 96 DPI…
What I’m trying to say is, the increase in resolution in a screen with a fixed physical size over time might actually be directly proportional to the DPI.
Since most people are more comfortable reading larger text, most of them would increase the DPI, say form 96 to 125/128 which would make the font size larger. To give a concrete example of the situation — A website viewed on a 1440×900 resolution with 128 DPI is approx. 200 pixels narrower than the same site viewed with the same resolution but with the default 96 DPI.
My vote is not for completely abandoning the 800×600 resolution – it will still be used in one way or another. A very elegant solution to this problem would be to drop the sidebar below all the posts when the screen resolution is low or the browser window is resized — the main wordpress.com site used to do this with the tags sidebar through a complex CSS coding – no javascript — just using fixed sizes and percentages. This way users with lower resolution were still able to open the website and enjoy it without a horizontal scroll. Good luck and keep the good work!
hi dear sadish , lots of comments about making a 1024×768 px but you didn’t work on new res :/
if you don’t want to do that please make a css mode for us or tell us how to edit mistylook theme to convert to 1024 px
nobody use 800×600 monitor now , and most of the links in these kind of themes are breaked to two line and that make blog awful , also images have higher res that before and you can’t use more than 510 px width in post :/
hope you hear and ask your theme fans
best wishes
It is not that I disregard people’s comments for a bigger resolution. I just did not think I could make justice to the MistyLook theme’s looks if I adjust its size.
I will definitely create new themes that are good for 1024×768 resolution.
Thanks
there would be a great demand for mobile browsers in the coming years that is for sure.:;’