opening && window considerations

Weblog Introduction
First of all, a brief introduction: this blog is meant to be a personal exploration of elements of web design. That being said, the primary sort of post should be factually relevant for virtually any designer/coder. For example, today's post...

Page Dimension Recommendations
Depending on the aim of your site, you may choose to target the traditional 800x600 resolution 1024x768 resolution, or some less commonly cited dimension (1280x800, for example). Many users are still running 800x600 screens, though, and 1024x768 is likely to become the new standard in coming years. (Based solely on the web usage statistics available from the W3C.)

Furthermore, most users till use IE, though a secondary group uses Firefox, and nearly all Mac users use Safari (at least as far as I know). As such, I did a little exploration regarding displayed page dimensions in IE and Firefox on 800x600 and 1024x768 screen resolutions.

The following data are based on limited investigation on my part and intended solely as a starting point in determining page layouts.

Firefox 800x600 - 783x437
IE 800x600 - 779x461
Firefox 1024x768 - 1007x605
IE 1024x768 - 1003x612

Conclusions
It appears that keeping your most important content within a 700x400 box is sufficient for 800x600 layouts and a 1000x600 box is sufficient for 1024x768 layouts.

Caveat: These data are preliminary and have not yet been checked in any capacity--a more extensive report on dimensions for page layout should come within the next couple of months, depending on my schedule.

Postscript: I realise that this post is itself poorly formatted, but I haven't the time to do more just now--'tis already 00 30, and I need to get some sleep tonight.