Biggest evil in the Web is the setting sizes and coordinates as absolute number of pixels. Dear Web-masters please stop this practice!!! Please look how ugly sites appear on screens with higher than you have expected resolutions. Such resolutions are far from being unique. For example: 1400x1050 is the default screen resolution of my cheap $1000 notebook.

Please! Please! Use percents(%) to specify desired element sizes, it is not difficult!!! Just specify width="100%", please do not use width="800".

From expert on Web usability Jakob Nielsen :

2. Use a liquid layout that lets users adjust the homepage size
Compliance rate: 28%
Guideline number in Homepage Usability book: 67

Fighting frozen layouts seems a lost battle, but it's worth repeating: different users have different monitor sizes. People with big monitors want to be able to resize their browsers to view multiple windows simultaneously. You can't assume that everyone's window width is 800 pixels: it's too much for some users and too little for others.

So, the bad examples: CNN

http://www.springframework.org/ Look how distorted the site appear when I try to make fonts bigger (Mozilla's CTRL+(+) keystroke ) to avoid using magnifying glass to read sites content.

Good example: See how nice Yahoo! FINANCE looks:

Last update: 2004-02-21