The quandry over just how to design a web page to accomodate visitors with different screen resolutions is slowly being resolved by hardware manufacturers and the natural replacement of equipment. Today designing to accomodate older computers is less of an issue because there just are not that many left.

There is also a change in concept of just what is good web design. Five years ago pages were designed to fit within your viewable screen without having to move up, down, right, or left. Today more and more design is targeted to fit width, but project vertically as far as needed to display relevant information This has the added benefit of reducing page loads and searching around for related data.

Screen Resolution

According to the web site www.w3schools.com over 80% of all users now use a screen with a resolution of 1078 pixels or larger, so that is the resolution we are designing to as we build this site. If you have a lower resolution then perhaps it is time for an upgrade. To have a screen with a lower resolution one would probably be running either Windows 98, Windows 2000, or one of its derivitaves. With the introduction of Windows Vista and the attendant hardware upgrades and replacements, screen resolutions will rise rapidly and there is, therefore, no real reason to design to anything lower. We also plan to upgrade our page designs as resolutions rise to take advantage of the improvements. In short, the days of designing to the lowest common denominator are behind us.

Color Depth

Like screen resolutions, acceptable color usage is changing. With older computers using what was called a "Web Safe" color palate was important. This consisted of 216 colors that were tried and true with all screens and produced colors that did not dither (looked blotched) on your screen. But today over 86% of all people surf the internet using screens with 32 bit color. This means that they can display over 16 million colors, so designing with 216 when you can produce over 16 million seems a little restrictive and impractical. Less than 2% of all users now use the old 8 bit color schemes that limited color usage.

Our design

So we are designing our graphics with the use of Photoshop and paying little attention to "Web Safe" colors and creating graphics that we feel convey our mission. We design on a combination of screens with resolutions of either 1920 pixels or 1366 pixels. We do restrict our page width to fit on a 1024 pixel screen, but that is our only limit. We would like to design to a wider screen width, and will do so when standards allow.

We also changed from having our site navigation from the left side of the screen to the right. This also helps the reader since your content is on the left where we would naturally read first.