Widescreen vs Squarescreen?

[Twaddle]

What's the best design route to be taking now in regards to the ever more popular Widescreen laptops and monitors?

I had half an idea just now to have an entry page to give users a choice but then realised, how the hell would I do it?

Reason being is I'm getting sick of scrolling all the time on my widescreen laptop these days and wondered if it might be worth starting to do sites similar to this test site I just did which for the most part would involve no scrolling.

The thing is though, when I view it on my 'normal' display, it only uses half the 'real estate', so I came up with the idea of an entry page that had a choice... that's when my wonderful idea just ended, absolutely no idea how I would implement it.

[kiddo]

If you have to give them a choice, you can store the choice in a cookie or session var and load a stylesheet based on that.

IMHO, keeping things at around 900-1000px wide works well for most folks with average computers and allows for a nice design.

Or, a fluid center can work too, but is harder to make a design that looks nice and doesn't fall apart.

[Twaddle]

IMHO, keeping things at around 900-1000px wide works well for most folks with average computers and allows for a nice design.

I guess that's my point, more and more people don't have 'average' computers, even in this 3rd world country most people I know have a widescreen laptop, just seems a bit daft to be basing a site on what's becoming an obsolete resolution... at some point surely it has to change, same as it did with 640x480... 800x600....

Sorry, it's just a rant I'm having and I hate scrolling

[kiddo]

If you want to hack around with it, I think I saw (on dynamicdrive . com perhaps?) a jscript to try and detect browser resolution.

I thought it was interesting but had no time to play with it. This might be interesting or helpful for you and maybe not have to ask the person.

[Twaddle]

I don't think it's worth hacking around with to be honest.

The demo site I referred to is mine, so I think I am just going to do it all in a nice easy to read widescreen format and see how it goes...

Thanks for the feedback and tips though

[EZorb]

I guess that's my point, more and more people don't have 'average' computers, even in this 3rd world country most people I know have a widescreen laptop, just seems a bit daft to be basing a site on what's becoming an obsolete resolution... at some point surely it has to change, same as it did with 640x480... 800x600....

Sorry, it's just a rant I'm having and I hate scrolling

I am with you on the scrolling. I have just change my website so the body appears to be a 8.5x11 sheet of paper. If you need more space than on one sheet of paper there are tab at bottom for Page 2, Page three, and so on. Now the scrolling is minimum.

Larry