Help! Designing for different resoultions

I'm doing an internship at a printing company, and have been put in charge of implementing their website which came to me already designed. I know it's not a good design, there is not much about that I can change...it's been approved by the management yadda yadda yadda.

The draft is here: www.paragon-digital.com

Everything but the text is one image that came to me at 1024*768 resolution. Can anyone help me think of ideas so that it will stil look reasonably good at different screen resolutions? For example 1152 * 824?

Thanks.

My advice is take that graphic into photoshop or fireworks or whatever you use and optimise it down to a more manageable size (and file size). At the moment it is coming in at a whopping 570K which will take almost 2 minutes to download for folks still on 56K dialup modems. The latest stats I have seen show 1024x768 is at 45% of users and 800x600 is down to 32% and falling. You have to think of people on iMacs (like I use at work) and laptops who have smaller monitors. It's up to you of course what dimensions you go for. Have you got access to your server logs to get stats on your website visitors?

Yea, took me about a minute to download (56k). What I would do, as a designer, is make it about 780 wide, and center it nice on the screen, maybe stylize the border a bit.

gl

This version is a lot more manageable in size.

Yea better, though a big fuzzy.

That's the tradeoff; file size for quality. I just reduced the quality to 80%. You could try 90%. The file size will be substantially larger, I expect, but still nowhere near what you have now.

Hey, PRINT is not like web man, when you print you judge for one size or a size that will adjust to the format, specifically an image that is 1000x1000x300 print format can be sized to any size on a printer by 1 x 1 interval (dotmatrix, inkjet, colorlaser, pantone, cmyk, rgb, b/w) when you work with web you have to judge on 1 size, 800x600, thats the size that computers come at standard res (similer to prints standard res of 300pixels for print and 200 to 600 pixels for screen), and not many people change it, well at least that I have seen (old people, dumb people, young web surfers who dont know a lick of computers). You design based on that because why?

When you work with print and you blow up your image you have to level it, curve it, adjust it, yadda yadda yadda, all that stuff they taught us at the Art Institute. Buth when you shrink it it gets better res right, your squeezing your tiny little pixels closer together creating a smaller image till those pixels cant be squished no more. I design all my sites for 800x600 because it well................makes it easy for them to use it if i dont oversize it and create a horizontal scroll bar, which if you ask me SUCKS..........and well it gives you the change to optimize your graphics to look good in 800x600 (not choppy but not slow preferably gif or png128 - - interlaced) If you notice when you enlarge lots of sites the graphics have a little see through outter glow (photoshop layerstyle) that makes it look like its somewhat pixelized but you know its not because its been websnapped which in terms is somewhat the same but somewhat different. So if you design your graphics in 800x600 for web you create much better images, but your goonna need a big screen like i use at least a 21" so you still have desktop space on your mac!

Thanks for all the advice. I guess the best thing to do, after fixing the image size is just to try and center it so that the white space goes all the way around? After I fix the size.

Again, I didn't design it. They just want me putting it up. I know it's bad, and I'm considering recommending that it be redesigned.

Yea thats what I would do. Seems to be pretty standard, and would look better besides.

Should add some CSS to the main page, that link is so unattractive

SO are lots of men, but that dont stop women from dating them, ha ha!