Website layout and wide screen

hi there ...
can anyone give me any suggestions about how to design a webpage which can be viewed in good way on the normal screen and on the wide screen ... when I view pages from my current site on the wide screen, the pages get stretched in a way my site doesnt look good ...

any suggestions or tips ...

I always do it this way:
- decide whether to build the site for 800x600 or 1024x768 resolution; don't use bigger resolutions
- create table 800px width (or 1024px) and center it horizontally
- proceed...

Do a google search for fluid width css design, that would be your best bet.

There are plenty of css resources out there such as:

http://blog.html.it/layoutgala/

use percentage widths

It's really a matter of tastes. There's advantages and problems with either solution.

Fixed width designs can get lost on larger displays, but if you have a design that would be compromised by having it stretched across a huge monitor, they work fine.

At the same time, fluid width css designs are great for filling up screen real estate, but you can sometimes wind up with text columns that are stretched to 12" wide which is really hard to read and unattractive.

You can also do a fluid width design but assign a max-width css attribute to your outer div or table so it stretches to a certain point, but not enough to make it unattractive. Max-width doesn't work natively in IE, but there's a lot of hacks out there. I've used this one in the past:

http://doxdesk.com/software/js/minmax.html

Old school or not, that works and don't cracks!
Read what grieffin said:

At the same time, fluid width css designs are great for filling up screen real estate, but you can sometimes wind up with text columns that are stretched to 12" wide which is really hard to read and unattractive.

The other thing that no-one seems to consider when discussing
web site sizing....

My screen maybe 1024x768 in resolution, but who says I have
my browser window max'd?

Fluid designs can cope much better, but they are much harder
to get right. I think the trick is to make it's right at your chosen
resolution (eg 800x600) and make sure that is pretty good at a
larger one (eg 1024x768).

It will flow larger or smaller but may not look as good as you like.

Maybe there are CSS geniuses out there you can achieve the
nirvana of a site that looks perfect at ALL resolutions, but I have
never met one..... yet anyway

If you use a table 800px across, you will not see all of the table due to the fact that the whole screen is set to 800px. This includes the scrollbars. Therefore your page will be less than 800px.

One rule of thumb is always develop at the lowest resolution taht majority of users will use. At the momment that is, 800x600.

Elija's comment about what if the window isn't resized....I think most people understand that they have to resize the window to view everything....and if they don't, they should.

I have worked on a helpdesk.

You would be suprised. Really really suprised and then depressed

I did cause a big argument here and I just knew about it ... thank you all guys for your help ... I will consider all the options and I will see which one will work with me effectivly ... thanks again ...

The important thing to remember is that you should never force the user to bend to your will. Sometimes we must make design compromises in order to make our product available to the largest audience.

I used to build ALL of my pages in tables, but discovered that it was much easier to maintain my sites if all of the pages were built with the same CSS. Something you can't do with tables. I have also compromised on design so that I can use almost no hacks. Never know what crazy thing IE is going to do next and I don't want to have to go back and undo hacks later.