http://www.hellrazer.net/testing/blendsite.html

http://www.hellrazer.net/testing/blendsite.html

technically not a site yet, just a design using a new script i wrote with php/gd to create the blending effect.

main points of concern where load times and whether the site should be a bit wider.

all thoughts and opinions welcome!

i prefer to make my sites flexible, so that they change with the users resolution, but most sites seem to operate around a fixed layout based on 800x600 or 1024x768, i haven't seen many go for the next one down like you. The smaller, the more people you make it accessible to...

to be honest i didnt actually design it at that low resolution, graphics card doesnt go that low
but i think in future ill set it to 1024x768 (even though a fair few people (i think) still have 800x600)
probobly just set the width to about 800 instead of 600

I think the actual demographic is something like:

640*480 = 5% of users
800*600 = 45% of users
1024*768 = 45% of users
higher = 5% users

There are many things that will define what size a site should be designed at (target audience, client, content, etc) ...
I once designed a website for an insect repellent product, that was designed to scale up and down to fit all resolutions, but the client was using such a high res monitor - that he constantly argued the pictures were too small

I have no idea why I told you that, maybe just some light relief

i think for websites that change shape depending on browser, that a key thing to do is have any columns, headers and footers a fixed size, and have the content as a percentage. I think it would work quite well, aslong as the content column had central text alignment.

The blending image test seems to have done quite well, i actually changed some of the background images to have a width of 1 instead of anything higher. Changing the width and background-repeat:repeat-x; changed the load time of the images from like 5 secs to instant.