Page size

Hi Nathalie,

You'll forgive me for smiling widely, and saying "welcome to the world of web design!"

What you're asking is a very common topic of discussion, and a challange that all web designers face.

Keep in mind, that even if your visitor has a resolution of, say, 1024x768, they may not have maximised their browser window. They may also have a big sidebar with their browsing history, or bookmarks, or another toolbar they've installed.

There are three roads you can take here.

1) Make a 'fixed width' site, catering for the majority of your audience's resolution. Install an analytics tool to gather stats of your visitors (Google Analytics is free and fairly easy to set up). The 'safe' resolution at the moment is 1024x768. It used to be 800x600, but more and more sites are defaulting to 1024.

To acheive this technically, you can use CSS. Dreamweaver has plenty of templates to choose from - see your File -> New dialogue box. The old way was to have an HTML table, with a fixed width of pixels. Sometimes this table would be centred, so that you have an even amount of space on either side of the site.

2) Make an 'elastic width' site, which adjusts automatically to cater for whatever size window the user chooses. Like our site here. For that, you just make your DIVs or layout TABLE 100% in width, and don't try and control the text or layout too much.

3) Detect which resolution your visitor is using (eg. using Javascript), and apply a different style (eg. CSS style sheet file) which adjusts your site to fit that reslution - Much more work! Good luck with THAT one.

Which way you choose also depends on the type of content you're displaying. eg. if it's a site of essays, elastic site's are fine - they will just adapt to fit all of the text in the browser window. For more graphical sites, with sidebars and sections, you may want to stick with the fixed width solution.

If this answer resolves your query, please mark the question as 'resolved' (see below). Otherwise, please post a follow-up response to this post, and I will assist you further.

Regards, Rich