Website Design: 960px outdated?

Scottland

Scottland

Scottland

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
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Location
North Wales
For a while now I've been using 960px as a starting point for a websites max width. When looking around the net, a lot of guides and tutorials suggest using this width or one close to is.
A lot will also tell you to base any mock ups on http://960.gs

However, I do wonder if this is a little outdated now? More laptops than ever are being sold and most with a 1280+ display. Small 10" tablets are coming with the same res screens, and desktop monitors are generally 720P/1080P these days too.

Recently I've been playing with a 27" iMac and some websites look minuscule on it!

Is now the right time to start experimenting with different widths and sizes? What are your thoughts?
 
With 12% of my traffic still using 1024 as their width, I'm not going to exclude them just yet.
 
Depends on your target market at this point, the netbook fad probably didn't help move us in the right direction but there's definitely room for larger layouts at this point, I still like to play it safe with a 960 max content width but dress up the background beyond to give the illusion of a larger site, im no professional though these are my own projects.
 
One answer is to use a responsive type design, very much in fashion at the minute.

With the iPad (and other tablets) sporting a 1024x768 resolution, I don't think the old 960px fixed width is going to disappear just yet.
 
websites that demand a large (>1024 screen) are downright annoying . Newsflash - we don't all want to browse the net with scrollbars or maximised windows.
 
whitecrook said:
websites that demand a large (>1024 screen) are downright annoying . Newsflash - we don't all want to browse the net with scrollbars or maximised windows.
Click to expand...

No I agree, I wasn't suggesting 1800px wide - but something beyond 960?

Has anyone ever played with custom stylesheets depending on screen resolution?
 
960 is still my preferred.

Then media query for tables, mobiles etc.

I doubt we'll be of 960 for a loooong while. In which case we'll media query larger, or have a better solution by then. Eventually if resolution is too big, fonts look too small.
 
I'm have a 1080p monitor and haven't really got a problem with 960px, in fact i quite like it. But I guess it depends on your browsing preferences; I always browse in a window approx 1400px wide, if I regularly browsed full screen I could see it could be annoying.
 
Depends massively on the application. If it's an ecommerce type site I always prefer a page that fills my monitor, so I can see more of it, but if it's a blog I much prefer fixed width so that the number of characters per line can be controlled.

I've dabbled with liquid layouts, but I'm just not skilled enough to implement one yet
 
Just started looking at responsive designs, but, as usual, IE throws a hissy fit! Have a few sites based on 960 just because they have large amounts of users with smaller resolutions...
 
I just target a browser width with two different screen res, anything under 1200 is locked to 1000px, over it stretches to 80% width so almost fills the screen with a nice spacing each side.
 
This topic is always one that interests me, when I made my company site http://www.oaksoft.co.uk (this isn't a spam as I hardly post on the damn thing) I made a design that catered for slim (760px or 800x600), wide (960px or 1024x768) or elastic which stretches to 90%, along with font-size customisation (S, M & L) and it all gets saved for future visits, it works in IE and FF...

If I wasn't going to go with this I would probably use a high percentage elastic with min-width at 760px and max-width at 1240px, although the content does matter re this, some content just doesn't lend itself well to any variations in width, then it is a matter of looking at your target audience, although one should argue that that should always be considered first and foremost...

regards,
J.
 
At work we still design for 960px (sometimes with a semi-fluid width up to 1160-1200px) with separate mobile views or stylesheets depending on the complexity of the site.

Most typography books quote 50-75 characters per-line as 'optimal readability', so it's difficult to get fluid sites to be visually pleasing. As an example, the site quoted above when set to 'flow' @ 1920px wide, even with the largest font, uses 250+ characters per line. Usually with fluid sites I find myself having to resize my browser to make text pleasant to read.

When this question gets asked a lot of people usually say "fluid/liquid" but to be honest I can't remember the last time I saw a 'designed' fully-fluid site (excluding blogs/forums/wikis/shops). So anyway, I'd stick with 960px for now, that's just my personal opinion of course :p.
 
PaulM said:
At work we still design for 960px (sometimes with a semi-fluid width up to 1160-1200px) with separate mobile views or stylesheets depending on the complexity of the site.

Most typography books quote 50-75 characters per-line as 'optimal readability', so it's difficult to get fluid sites to be visually pleasing. As an example, the site quoted above when set to 'flow' @ 1920px wide, even with the largest font, uses 250+ characters per line. Usually with fluid sites I find myself having to resize my browser to make text pleasant to read.

When this question gets asked a lot of people usually say "fluid/liquid" but to be honest I can't remember the last time I saw a 'designed' fully-fluid site (excluding blogs/forums/wikis/shops). So anyway, I'd stick with 960px for now, that's just my personal opinion of course :p.
Click to expand...

Just the point I was about to make. I hate reading really wide columns of text. When layouts stretch across the entire width of the screen they become really annoying to read IMO.

(I hate reading OcUK in a maximised window for this very reason. I instead use it in a window that's only around half the size of my full resolution.)
 
The trend currently seems to be using CSS media queries to serve different styles to different widths of screen/viewports, this is something I am going to implement on my portfolio redesign, which I'll hopefully get finished before I head back to Uni.

There's a few examples on here http://designshack.co.uk/articles/c...using-media-queries-for-responsive-web-design

So basically you can start off with whatever width you want and then scale down for smaller screens :)

Edit: http://sasquatchfestival.com/ this is particularly impressive, who knew resizing a browser window could be so much fun!
 
Thanks for all the responses guys - it's good to hear other people opinions etc.

Been reading quite a bit on responsive designs this last few days, this article I thought was very good.
 
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