I tend to make sites that don't go beyond 800 pixels wide. If someone has a resolution of 640x480, I'm sorry, but they're beyond hope and they're probably used to horizontal scrolling anyway. Besides, about 3% of the people out there are in 640x480.

Hmm. I've got my Windows monitor set at 1280x1024, but I never have the browser window more than half that width; textual sites such as this BBS are hard to read unless they're narrow. (In fact, textual pages are best read narrower still, but about half a screen-width seems to give the best compromise between text legibility on the one hand, and on the other navigability of sites that assume the browser is very wide.)

The best width to design your web pages to is 540, because that's about how many pixels you get on television sets. Devices smaller than that usually have HTML rewriters to get pages onto the smaller width.

Peter