What is best width

[Eric]

What is best website width you think? i use 1000 pixel and that proble very hard for a 800x600 to navigate but personally i think if its under 1000 pixel its look cheap.

[brendang]

My site is 900w, and it works well. Depends on the skill of your designer. Anything can be made to look like a million or horribly horribly wrong...

B.

[Inviting Ways]

After tweaking with my store (not live yet) I've found 1000 px to be ideal. I think it looks best and fits my products/logos/info better.

[bristweb]

first it is important to know your audience and make an executive decision based on that. if you have many visitors with 800x600 screen resolution, then you should definitely go smaller, but this is unlikely.

here is a good article
http://webdesign.about.com/od/webdesign/a/aa080904.htm

Every Web browser has a scrollbar, and borders on the sides that shrink the available space from 800 to around 740 pixels or less on 800x600 resolutions and around 980 pixels on 1024x768 resolutions.

[cekman]

Excellent question. I'm getting ready to live and I think the narrow screens look less than optimal.

If you choose a percentage rather than a set pixel size - won't it ALWAYS fit on the customer's screen?? I'm not clear on how that works.

[mueller]

Every Web browser has a scrollbar, and borders on the sides that shrink the available space from 800 to around 740 pixels or less on 800x600 resolutions and around 980 pixels on 1024x768 resolutions.

Yep, at 1000 wide our site showed scroll bars on true 1024X768 monitor. After much messing around I found that 980 was the sweet spot to remove the scroll bar.

[JLynn]

Can you tell me where I can specify the pixels? I would like to be around the 980 as well - but can't figure out where to put this in (the header footer option is limited). Thanks,
J-Lynn

[mueller]

I made the change in the frame.html file. Just set the main table that holds everything to 980 wide. I guess the exact location would depend on your frame design and there may be a better place to set this, but it worked for me.

[cekman]

Just go to

Settings -> Design -> Header and Footer

Toward the very top of the screen there is a box for screen width. You can set it to specific pixels or to a percentage. (Store Screen Space)

I would like to know if anyone has tried the percentages options yet?

[JLynn]

The header/footer is where I'd been changing it, but there's nothing between the 780 and 1,000 for options. Although I think most people have a wider screen these days - there are still some dinosaurs out there (when our flat screen desktop monitor died...we had to bring out our old one which is the smaller screen resolution) - the only plus to it, is I get to see how the site looks in both resolutions (desktop & laptop).

When I manually change the width in the frame.html in template/layout 5...it's changing spacing and dropping indents in the left product bar, and also throwing off the space on browse by price/manufacturer and search options (must be other places/templates to manually change widths). Anyways - sticking with "screenwidth" option and just using what's offered in the drop down - thanks for your help though.
J-Lynn