Web design issues

I have two questions:


(1) When designing applications for the Web, could you please point out how does one take into account screen resolutions? What should be the base that I must take for a start when I build the website?

One thing that comes to mind is to design on the lowest resolution that the target users will have and then provide percentages for every CSS units in all CSS selectors. Is this the right thing?


(2) How do you control font sizes? Mostly all websites I see will resize their font if I select a different font size from the IE View -> Text Size menu or by changing the size in Firefox.

However, some websites have their fonts fixed and they don't change their font size no matter what you adjust your browser's font size setting to. That is a pain in the ass, especially when their font sizes are tiny arials. I do not want that to happen to my website. How do I stop that? I used to think the fixed size comes from specifying an absolute size in CSS units, like 11px or 1.05in etc. and the adjustable font size comes from specifying a percentage or a relative CSS units such as 1.2em, or 3ex or 40% or 'smaller' etc.

What gives?

Hi Sathyaish

In answer to your questions:

1. Generally speaking I think web developers assume that there are still a load of users still using 800x600 screen resolution and therefore develop for this as the minimum requirement. There are three ways of looking at designing for screen resolution:
A: Design for the minimum - i.e. fix the width of the website at 800 pixels. I think the majority of good looking website use this method.
B: Design using percentages - better use of space for larger resolutions but much more difficult to get a good-looking "designed" website. I find this type of approach either looks great or absolutely terrible! Respect to the developer if you can pull this off!
C: Design a version for each resolution - I don't think there are enough hours in a day!

2. I would say the majority of sites use fixed text size as again designing the site to work with relative font sizes takes more work. However I think this is one thing people should try to do from an accessibility point of view. I do this using em units. For more information on accessibility take a look at http://www.w3.org/WAI/.

Let me know if you want to know more.

HTH

DJ