As you well know it is almost impossible to please everyone, but majority should rule with reference to screen size when building your website.

Statistics are important information. What you can read from the statistics in the table below is that 76% of users browsing the internet as of January 2010 are using a screen resolution of 1280x800 pixels or higher, with a color depth of at least 65K. Yes thing do change! 1280x800 is now the new standard.

Gone are the days of 800x600 as you can also see in the table below, although 1024x768 still holds approx. 20%, but this will also go the way of the 800x600 in a few years. Why is this? Because almost all computer monitors manufactured after 2007 have been large and wide.

If this is the case it is strongly suggested that when you build a new site or update an older one that you give these statistics some serious thought. Another important consideration is that your website no matter what size should always justify to the centre of the screen.

This data, was collected from W3Schools' log-files over ten years, and clearly shows the long term trends.

Here is a view of this page at a smaller resolution, set on a screen size of 1680x1200. If you decide to have your website set at 800x600 this is basically what the majority of your users will see. 1024x768 is where the line is set.

What we suggest, when building a new website or updating an older one is to have the site built so the edges of the main content be set to 1024x768 and then have more visual content bleed over to 1280 pixels, and then have the whole site justify to the centre. This would ensure your website would be up to date, visually appealing and readable by 76% of users.