Web Page Real Estate

[yahn]

I've recently become obsessed with how well my designs scale to extremely small view ports. I'm starting to wonder how much I should take this into consideration. Furthermore, I'm also starting to wonder how much I should consider extremely large view ports.

I'm working on a web site that is not specifically for mobile users but will have more mobile hits than non-mobile. Should I just design an entirely different style for mobile users as many websites do? Is it stupid to try to get the site to scale well to 320*240 windows?

Until recently, I had a fairly small resolution for the computer I use the majority of the time. So, I never really paid attention to how annoying some websites are when viewed in 1920*1200 resolutions. I could just set a maximum width for any content that would matter, but that seems like a waste of vertical space (another thing I've become obsessed with). Is there a better solution, or should I just not worry about it?

Thank you

[zartworkdesigns]

you can set a different stylesheet for mobile users which would help you be able to design for multiple users

[AlexDawson]

you can set a different stylesheet for mobile users which would help you be able to design for multiple users

If you mean the handheld CSS @ selector it won't help unfortunately, most mobile devices ignore it entirely or if they do take it into account they also use @screen (there are some which do use just @mobile but they are few and far between and only represent a tiny proportion of the market).

yahn, while having a flexible website is great, you don't want to let your liquid layouts spread too far out because just like pouring water on a table it will be thin and look out of place, I remember reading a usability study that said if it's over a certain amount width wide it becomes unreadable (Can't remember the explicit value) but in huge scale resolutions you want to worry less about the margins and focus on a maximum width. For mobile devices the reverse is true because the rarer screen space is, the more precious it is to show what you want to appear. Modern mobile devices have zoom functions to allow seeing a natural size (just with scrollbars that work well!) so you shouldn't redirect the user unless your pages are large in bandwidth (the most common issue with mobile devices).

Generally speaking you want to draw a balance between your real estate, whitespace requirements and ensure that you make the best use of the space available. If you have little room, use it wisely, if you have standard amount of space, be considerate but don't drown out the whitespace and if your have a huge amount of space, don't spread things too far apart or across.