This is my first real blog post so I apologize that it isn't amazing!

I'll be writing this assuming you have no idea what I am talking about that way you should be able to pick up on what I am saying easier. Computer monitors have thousands of little dots on them which make up the picture. TVs use the same technology. These dots are called pixels. The more pixels you have on the screen the better the picture you will see. Let me say this another way. If you can fit 800 dots in a 10 inch area you will get a decent looking picture. Now What if you could fit twice as many dots (1600) into the same area? The end result would look better. In essence this is what High Definition is (more pixels in a given area). The number of pixels you have on the screen is called your screen resolution. Now why is this important? People are used to scrolling windows vertically and there is no need to avoid this, on the other hand users find it annoying to have to scroll windows horizontally, don't you? Older computers ran at a resolution of 800x600, this means that there were 800 pixels (or dots) that filled the width of the screen and 600 pixels high. This mens that to prevent the user from being required to scroll horizontally on a page you must have a page less than 800 pixels wide. 

Now in theory could create a page that is 800 pixels wide and it would work fine right? Well, sometimes. Most likely all pages are going to require you to scroll vertically some. This adds in an extra variable, the scroll bar. If my page is taking up 800 pixels across the screen then the scroll bar takes up another 20 pixels that is 820 pixels. 20 pixels more than what the screen is showing. Therefor you will see a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of your window so that you can see the extra 20 pixels takes up by the vertical scroll bar. To get around this you must factor in the scroll bar size, which is different on every operating system, into your page width. 

With all that said the biggest factor when choosing the layout of your website is what audience you are catering to. I say this because new computer monitors run at a higher resolution than older monitors, and increasingly wide screens are becoming more common than the traditional square screens giving you more pixels to work with when it comes to the width. However not everyone is using a new computer that allows them to run at a higher resolution. Lets use a website that sells vehicles for an example. If you are new car Lexus dealership it is probably fair to assume that your potential customers and visitors will be running a newer computer system which supports a higher resolution monitor. What if you are a used car dealership? In that case you can expect a wide arrange of users several of which are running on an older computer which only supports an 800x600 screen resolution. You can do so much more with a design if you have more pixels to work with. However in the end the only thing that matters is the experience that the user has at the website. 

So how do I decide how wide to make the website? First off I start with the target audience, most of the time I cater the the users running an 800x600 resolution. My templates that are optimized for 800x600 end up being 750 pixels wide, allowing for 50 pixels for the scroll bar, and a small margin on either side which cleans it up. If I am catering to visitors that are more likely to be running a newer computer system which supports a higher resolution then Ill make the page 950 pixels wide. 

I hope I didn't confuse any of you. Please feel free to leave me comments below on what you thought of it. Remember to please keep your comments clean or they will be removed. If you have a subject that you would like me to write about I would love to know. 

Thanks,
Randy