Casual Rumblings

Here are some stats from analyzing one of my sites:

1024x768    34.13%    

1280x800    23.03%    

1280x1024    18.36%    

1440x900    6.52%    

1680x1050    3.98%    

800x600    2.58%    

1280x768    1.85%    

1920x1200    1.79%    

1152x864    1.66%    

1400x1050    1.13%    

1600x1200    0.75%    

1280x960    0.68%    

1280x720    0.62%    

1152x720    0.36%    

1024x600    0.26%    

1344x840    0.23%    

1366x768    0.23%    

2560x960   0.19%    

320x396    0.19%    

1024x640    0.17%    

1120x840    0.13%

1024 x 768 has been the standard for a number of years now.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display...

Personally, I think it all depends on the target audience of the website.

CNN was one of the first major news sites to adopt 1024x768, but what they did was wrap secondary news and navigation around their main content, which always fits within a 800x600 screen. Today, their top navigation area stretches to fit your screen, the content area fits within 1024x768 and their main news column fits within 600 pixels.

I had a number of arguments with marketing at my previous employer because they wanted the site to have a liquid layout, when most all of our competitors stuck to 800x600. Our content normally fit within 800x600 and we ended up with tons of CSS issues dealing with older browsers and the liquid layout.

If you use a CSS library like YUI Grids, you can test out layouts under different resolutions very easily.

Whatcha doing about handheld devices? What are the standard displays on those? 320 by 480?

I think 1024x768 and 1280x1024 are the most commen resolutions currently. It can also vary depending on your geographic location (or if you are targeting a specific geographic location).

I downloaded this <a href="http://www.brianapps.net/sizer.html">Sizer...; tool to see how my app/site looks like in different resoltions, unfortunately it doesn't have 1280x1024 option.

@Kumar: I believe I'll stick with Firefox's Web Developer plug in that does dynamic resizing of the browser to see how it'll look in various sizes that you set.