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Does it pretty much fill the width of your screen? If it does, you are set to 1024 pixels wide. Is there an inch or more of space that goes beyond the line in either direction? Then you are set higher to a higher resolution..
Why do we care about this?
Well, at the higher numbers, a viewer can see more stuff on the screen... and at the lower numbers, they see less. The key point here is that if we choose to utilize the full width of the widest screen, site visitors with lower resolutions will be required to “scroll” left and right to read the text.
So what do we do to fix this?
We don’t fix it... we deal with it. For example, we could design the site to fit the least common denominator of a 800x600 screen width. That’s why if you are viewing at a resolution higher than 800x600, you will see one or two inches of unused space on the left and right sides of the screen. In most cases, I recommend that we design for 800x600 knowing that at higher resolutions, viewers will see some blank space beyond our content. .. whereas the alternative would mean that people viewing your site at 800x600 would be constantly having to scroll their browser window left and right in order to read you text. The choice will be yours, but I can help you make a decision based on the specifics of your situation. If your site visitors are businesses or technical people, we might make the assumption that they are probably working with the higher resolutions. If you want to be able to reach the widest audience possible, including all the home users, we might decide to accomodate everything down to 800x600.
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