What is the best practice for sizing a webpage to fit any resolution screen (i.e. small or large screen).?

Question

Should the page be sized to smallest size or should it be centered?

Answer 1

your best bet is to set it to the most common size used by customers on your site. Often this will be 800 x 600. If you want your site to also work on things like cell phones, etc. you can use an @media style sheet.

For the 800 x 600 screen I recommend setting the page width to 765ish to fit with scrollbars, and anything else they might have on the side.

Centering everything can make your site look amaturish, so I recommend staying away from that.

Answer 2

I usually use around 780 wide by 600 high, but of course the height can vary. You really don't want to excede 800 wide, but now a days, since the 15" computer monitor isn't as popular, its not as big as a deal.

Otherwise, use a table width of 100%, that way the content widens evenly depending on the users screen.

Answer 3

Use CSS and float (most) everything. Use DIV tags instead of tables.
Divs which MUST be the width of the screen should be sized to 100%, not a fixed number of pixels.

Some things may need to be fixed width - like ads in a 125px wide box. But anything that does not, let it size itself.

All elements will position themselves according to the user's screen size.
It can be a bit of a pain to set up, but is worth it if you really need 'any resolution'..

On a wide screen, if each [#] is a box:

[####### 100% HEADER ######]
[#1#][###### MENU ######]
[#2#][##### Content #########
[#3#][######################
[#4#][######################]

Narrow screen
[#100% HEADER#]
[#1#][#2#][#3#][#4#]
[#### MENU ####]
[###CONTENT###]
[###CONTENT###]
[###CONTENT###]
[###CONTENT###]
[###CONTENT###]
[###CONTENT###]