Websites for various screen resolutions

They have: 7 posts

Joined: Mar 2004

I am currently developing a website and am trying to make it reasonably portable (the same size, layout, etc. relative to user's current screen resolution). Can anyone tell me if the best, or only, way to create websites which will appear the same (size, layout, positions, etc.) on various screen resolutions is to create a separate website scaled specifically for each particular targest screen resolution? Is there not some way to create a website in such a way as to have it automatically scale itself relative to the current screen resolution? Thanks.

s0da's picture

He has: 157 posts

Joined: Mar 2004

i guess either use javascript to redirect a user to a specific resolution page or hard code it yourself so that the page is friendly to all resolutions.

He has: 52 posts

Joined: Feb 2003

yeah just make it 800 wide / a fixed width.

Suzanne's picture

She has: 5,507 posts

Joined: Feb 2000

webspinner wrote: Can anyone tell me if the best, or only, way to create websites which will appear the same (size, layout, positions, etc.) on various screen resolutions is to create a separate website scaled specifically for each particular targest screen resolution?

No! That's an awful lot of work for no reason.

You can design it to a set resolution (800x600) and have empty space, or you can use fluid layouts (tables or in CSS) so that it will expand and shrink. You'll still need to define a minimum, however, if you're using images within the content such as logos, photos, et cetera (background images will not cause scroll, but can look awkward).

Learning about standards will help you learn the aspects you need to create websites that work on various resolutions. It's less of a concern now than having it work on multiple devices, however using standards will automatically handle a great many situations that arise.

As always, provide an URL for best advice.

They have: 5,633 posts

Joined: Jan 1970

There is no way you can make your site look exactly the same on all screen res. just make it work for 800X600 and dont worry about the rest. It will look fine.

He has: 1,758 posts

Joined: Jul 2002

You could code all the layout elements of the site using css, then use a server side scripting language to load a different stylesheet depending on the user-agent string.

Andy

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