What’s the best page size for a web design? Long answer…
Jun.2009 in

I get questions a lot from designers about not only optimal page width for layouts but what height to use to ‘keep everything above the fold’. Here is one answer I gave recently -

For width, I’m not a designer but I’ve read that 960px width is the way to go these days, because it lends itself to being divided into columns that look nice:

As far as ‘above the fold’, I just have to caution against using any such concept on the web. Horizontal scrolling can and should be avoided, but vertical scrolling is something you cannot 100% avoid. All I can tell you is that on a 1024×768 display (at least 95% of users have that or higher) you should be OK with a fixed 600px high block. But there are many different display formats out there, the browser chrome can take up a lot of room, and not everybody maximizes the browser window.

Here are some other sites that say more-or-less the same thing - but planning to get absolutely everything ‘above the fold’ for everyone is tough because then you might only have 400px or so, according to the actual statistics.


update [Dec 17 2009] A Google engineer just released his side-work project, which will let you view any site through an overlay that graphically represents the statistics they have gathered on viewport size. If that doesn’t make sense, don’t worry, it’s easy, check it out.

So this shows the ‘fold’ is not a fixed value, which we already knew. It’s never good to hide the legendary ‘Big Important Button’, but if you want to design to even the 80th percentile then you have a real small area to work with.

But to take it even further, here are a few more articles, based on empirical data, that generally conclude that scrolling should not be feared: