Liquid layouts are decidedly out-of-fashion. Fixed-width, centered layouts have become the dominant design pattern for the Web, and for good reason too. Fixed-width layouts allow designers to define strict proportions between columns, and keep line-lengths under control. Another thing that is not considered anymore by designers and developers is the 800×600 resolution, more and more people buy larger screens with better resolutions. Only about 4% of the users are still using the 800×600 resolution on their monitors. That means that we can increase the width of our pages, which will decrease the height and we can put more content to the top of the our pages.

Below you can see a list of random selected, fixed width, web pages

• Best Buy – 802px
• Buy.com – 1025px
• Microsoft – 950px
• eBay – 955px
• Apple – 998px
• About – 976px
• Live Journal – 1011px
• ESPN – 960px
• CNN – 1018px
• BBC – 1010px
• News – 1014px
• ABC – 1018px
• MSNBC/MSN – 1012px
• CBC – 1002px
• Yahoo – 966px
• NYT – 988px
• Youtube – 991px
• Facebook – 980px
• Myspace – 976px
• Hi5 – 983px
• WordPress – 976px
• Flickr – 966px
• Photobucket – 976px
• IMDB – 1029px

Most of the pages will fit inside 1024×768 (except IMDB & Buy.com), which will cover around 93% of your visitors [ source: W3School Display Statistics ].

In conclusion, if you select your next web site to have fixed width you can choose for your width to be anywhere between 960px to 1020px.

Note: the average width from the sites above is 982px, which will give you 980px page width with 1px for left & right border.

Tip: You can also have 100% header & footer with fixed width body.