Looking for a suggestion in Skin Width what is the standard most people have these days?

IIRC, in the old days (first half of the 2000s?), most people agreed that the majority of people needed their site width geared at an 800 x 600 display for public viewing.  Someone (webmonkey maybe?) had an article on their site that did a detailed analysis of the browsers of the day and determined that 744 was optimum - or at least the widest you could go without making the dreaded horizontal scroll bar appear.  That having been said - and I haven't kept up on it - more recently 1024 x 768 was the most popular.  So 1024 minus 56 equals 968.  However, the landscape is more confusing nowadays.  The majority of new computers have wide screens.  Depending on your point of view the "best choice" or the "safe choice" might be very different.

I would hunt around for some articles or industry data on popular screen widths and work from there to find out what you are comfortable with - or what your expected user base is comfortable width.  I recently worked on a magazine for "seniors" and this had a dramatic affect on the final choices for default width and font sizes.

Anyone want to reply with links to modern sites that show browser usage data and display size data?

Ann,

If the skin designer can't figure it out, most likely no one can.  Setting the width of a content area should be easy for the original designer, and it's easy to simulate a smaller screen resolution even if you have a large screen monitor. 

That said, "doesn't display properly" doesn't explain the problem at all.  Is it that the content area is wide enough that scrollbars and scrolling are necessary to view the content?  Or are the containers/modules not lining up properly?  Or are the background graphics "breaking"?  Or is it the text size that isn't correct?  Lots of things could happen that would fall under "doesn't display properly".

My guess would be to use the Index Wide skin, but that's only if it uses the ".template_styleWide" class for the content area width.  Then you should be fine with any size monitor as the content area will fill 90% of the screen width no matter what size monitor or screen resolution.  But, you could run into problems if the widths of the content panes are set to fixed pixels widths.  Then, the skin's overall width setting won't necessarily work as a percentage since the fixed content pane widths could override that by creating a minimum width equal to the total of the content panes' widths... and again, the skin designer should be able to figure all this out for you quite easily if it is only a matter of width settings.  

Of course, you also have to account for the actual content being used.  For example, if you set the skin width to 800px, and place a 550px wide photo in the LeftPane and a 450px wide photo in the ContentPane, well, depending on how the skin is set to handle overflow, you're likely to not have it display the way you want or expect.  But, again, the skin designer can help with that as well.  As long as everything is taken into consideration when developing a solution, and there can be a lot of different variables at play.  If there isn't an easy answer to the particular "doesn't display properly" issue you are having, then I would think the designer would offer to do customization of the skin for a nominal charge to tailor it to your particular needs... unless you're not able to narrow down what the issue is, then they can only guess and hope that's what you meant...

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