The days of designing for 800 x 600, 15 inch monitors are long gone. The future is looking more and more like 1024 x 768 on 17 inch LCD monitors, AT LEAST.
But what can get designers to make mistakes is although they’re designing a website for a resolution of 1024 x 768, the computer screen that they are using is probably 1240 x 1028, on a 21 inch monitor or a wide screen laptop.
This can lead to mistakes when it comes to sizing the viewable webpage when they upload their design.
Designers can easily make the webpage too big to fit on a 1024 x 768 monitor, as this represents the total resolution (including web browser, taskbar etc.) and not the maximum viewable resolution.
If you’re using Dreamweaver however, you’re in luck… It has an option to view the maximum viewable area for different monitor sizes.
Make sure you are in ‘Design View’, unmaximized and click the drop down list as show above.
From the list, select the size of the resolution you are targeting. For convenience, I’ve listed down the common ones below:
- 536 x 196 (640 x 480 resolution)
- 760 x 420 (800 x 600 resolution)
- 955 x 600 (1024 x 768 resolution)