Reply #1: That's a hard nut ...

[RoyGBiv]

Note: I'm not a "web developer" but maintain a website I've had since 1996 and am now doing some design and content work at my new job. So, I have some small bit of mostly philosophical input.

In part, it depends on your intended audience.

Brief story: When I was first building my website, everything was optimized for 1024x768 with 10pt type for text. And, this was back when few people had LCD's and a 15" CRT was pretty standard. I had a 17", and that resolution was comfortable to me. One of the early visitors to my site and I got into a discussion about the content, and he offered some design advice from "one of the old fogies" like him who'd probably visit it a lot. His advice was simply to think of how hard it is for someone with poor eyesight to read text at that font size. His screen res was 640x480 because anything more was uncomfortable to him. I took that advice to heart.

Now, things have changed a lot since then, and browsers can allow users to adjust sizes despite what you do, but that's one of the problems you face. No matter what res you use as standard, you're going to have visitors who bypass everything you do to optimize the pages or not visit at all if they can't. Take DU's main page, for example. Use the browser function that allows you to increase the font size to something visually impaired people might use, and very little is going to be "above the fold."

In the stuff I do, I generally think in terms of width and keep the absolutely essential stuff I want people to see immediately when they hit that page within that width and a relatively small height. Also consider that not everyone views websites with the browser maximized. In addition, some people have several 3rd party toolbars in their browser or have a tab bar all the time or surf with one browser that doesn't take up much real estate above the viewable area while others use one that has large buttons or fonts or whatever, all of this reducing the viewable height.

The width I do is 800 pixels. A good banner with a logo and/or a top-level menu bar can fit nicely in that and doesn't need much height, e.g. DU's pages. But, if I don't absolutely need the extra space, I optimize for 640 width. Note that I don't make it static to that width, rather allow it all to fit inside that if that's the size of the browser the viewer is using.

The user-friendly rule is to avoid as much as possible anything that *requires* a certain resolution. You can get away with requiring 800 pixels in length these days most of the time. Thinking in terms of the height of a page or what is "above the fold" is, imo, pretty much useless aside from some sort of "headline" style attention grabber.