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What is Screen Resolution? Resolutions and Cool Page Design For All Screens Center Page in Window

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Screen Resolutions

Website Resolution Tester Perfect Page Margins WebTV Screen Resolution

What is Screen Resolution? The Screen Resolution signifies the number of dots (pixels) on the entire screen.  For example, a 800x600 pixel screen is capable of displaying 800 distinct dots on each of 600 lines.  The screen width is 800 pixels and the screen height is 600 pixels. Screen Resolution is controlled by the Windows Display Properties and the graphics hardware/software of the computer:

Screen Resolutions and Cool Page   Cool Page uses exact pixel positioning of objects on the page.  This means that wherever you place an object, that is where it will appear when viewed in a web browser.  If your page is wider than the screen size of a viewer's computer, the web browser will automaticallly add horizontal scrollbars, allowing your page to be viewed in it's entirety. Some webpage editors design pages with HTML code that causes the page to fit to the width of the browser window automatically.  In essence, wider pages have their content (text and images) "bumped" down the screen.  When using such editors, html programming is much more tedious and requires extensive testing at numerous screen resolutions and monitor sizes to achieve reliability and proper design. Viewers do not see the page as the author intended it to be seen. What makes Cool Page appealing is that pages are rapidly designed with pixel-accurate drag+drop and can be viewed in 99% of all web browsers and the user will see the page exactly as the author intends.  Designing pages in HTML code that can reformat to window width and look reasonable at all possible visitor Screen Resolutions and monitor sizes has it's drawbacks.  For example, imagine a text column designed to be 2 inches wide and 4 inches tall, that ends up 8 inches wide and 1 tall.  This can not happen with Cool Page designed web pages. Note: An exciting development on the near horizon is that Version 3.0 of Cool Page will include a feature that combines the "best of both worlds", exact pixel positioning and fit to width layout. Design For All Screens Most monitors sold today are at least 15".  The most common Screen Resolution used is 800x600.  Design your pages for 800x600 screens and your pages will look good in the vast majority of visitor's screens. Use Colored Boxes on your page as a method of controlling the width of the page.  (see the Margins Guide)   Allow at least 30 pixels of the width for a vertical scrollbar.  Scrollbar width is controlled by a user's computer Appearance settings (Appearance Tab in image above) and allow approx 10 pixels of the width for the browser program window itself.  This give a working area of about 760 pixels for the webpage minus the right and left margins used. Optional: Set page to center in the browser window. Center Page in Window Pages can be made to automatically center in the browser window.  This feature only works in Internet Explorer 4x, 5x, 6x and greater browsers and Netscape 6X and greater browsers.  Page Center is not supported by IE 3x browsers and Netscape 4x and below browsers. 1. Right click any blank area of the page to open the Page Properties window. 2. Click the General Tab. 3. Use these page Alignment settings: