Question:

In these days of responsive websites, large and wide monitors, down to small mobile phones, etc., what should the recommended theme widths be to keep everyone happy?

Weaver responds:

First, remember that Weaver Xtreme is inherently responsive, so that even sites designed for wide monitors will still look good on smaller screens.

So, you should design you site to look great on big desktop monitors, really good on most notebooks, and let the theme responsive design handle most small screens like tablets and phones.

I’ve settled on 1100px as a good design width for sites – but use extend bg width for menus, header, footer. This will look good on 1280px wide monitors (with room for scroll bars, etc.), which is a smallish width these days. One should also consider switching to 1600px (for more and more common 1920px wide monitor – standard HD width). But there are still lots of notebook computers with less than 1920px.

Another recent trend is for full width designs – or at least very wide designs with extended margins for the widest monitors.

But it doesn’t seem essential to design to 1024px monitors any more – and Weaver’s responsive design will still make sites look good on narrower screens. The cutoff for tablets seems to have standardized at 768px.

See this chart: http://www.rapidtables.com/web/dev/screen-resolution-statistics.htm

Note that 1100px will cover around 60% of the current monitor mix. Maybe 1200px would work okay, too, given that 1280px monitors would only take away 10% – with the caveat that the site would be at design width only if the browser is full screen to get full design width (but again, the responsive design will still look good.)

Weaver Xtreme Version 3.0 has added new features for using responsive full-width bg and header images that really help to keep the content at that 1100px threshold while filling up the screen on wide monitors with at least color or images.