Please keep in mind, when making a fixed width layout you have to design for a particular screen resolution. That screen resolution these days is no bigger than 1024 x 768. If you design for a larger resolution, your site visitors will see a horizontal scroll bar. This is not desirable!
The majority of site visitors do not like to scroll both vertically and horizontally. Thus, the norm in web design is to avoid triggering the horizontal scrolling mechanism.
What does all this mean to you? It means the width of your layout should not exceed 960-970px.
Likewise, I caution you not to rely on the appearance of your web site ON YOUR COMPUTER! This is not necessarily an accurate view of your site. What matters is how your site will appear on all other computers as well. This is where Super Preview comes in handy.
Super Preview allows you to view your web site at different screen resolutions. You must always remember, your visitors do not have the same computer that you do. Because of this, web sites render a bit differently. Your job is to ensure that your site renders similarly on all computers.
Well, add Google Analytics to your web pages and keep an eye on the usage of Screen resolutions. Over 100 different screen resolutions hit my site monthly.
But the 2 main Sizes I keep tabs on include 1024 x 768 and 1280 x 600 or any 1280 x height. It's really the width that is important.
Right now, September 2010, 1024 and 1280 are used equally.
Look at my Google Analytic Stats for Screen Resolution usage. Notice that 15% of hits came from a Resolution of 1280 x 800 and 14% came from 1024 x 768.
Based upon these stats, it is way too soon to increase our Designing to 1280 x 700. Stick with 1024 until its usage is considerably lower.
How low? Well, there's nothing written in stone that says we have to wait until a certain percentage. But, as a general rule of thumb, we need to meet the needs of the majority of our Viewers. And your viewers may be different than mine. Just use your good judgement. I would wait until 1024 is well under 5% usage. But it would also depend upon anything else going on at the time.
