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I am any where from 770 - 990 depends on the project.

Large visual background images, make the layout seem larger and fill bigger screens, while running off the screens of people running smaller settings. Still makes for more creativity, there are several posts around different places showing Large visual background images, make the layout seem larger and fill bigger screens, while running off the screens of people running smaller settings. Still makes for more creativity, there are several posts around different places showing some nice wide backgrounds.
Mark’s comment is spot on, it’s hard to accommodate people running 1600 plus, although certain portions of the background tiling full-width works. It gets tricky layering backgrounds, but call it coding fun.

The grid systems are good though in that they can help people to learn a lot more about CSS and design standards if they take the time to look into them

Yes, but I’m talking more to the pro level - the ones that refer to themselves as web designers or developers and do it as a profession.

it’s hard to accommodate people running 1600 plus

I’ll certainly agree with that. There are limits 😊

4-5 months ago I reviewed about 300 business sites. It was the most boring thing I’ve done in ages. 95% were the same-o, same-o header, body area (2/3/4 columns) footer standard template style layout. Other than the header graphic and coloration they all looked the same. You see a lot more creativity/variety on the print side I must say. Seemed like web design was in a stand still.

960 all the way for me, largely because of the theory behind the 960 grid system. Makes things so much easier. Also depends on the site of course, but 960 width is the norm for us.

Ditto.

I learned a long time ago that the client only really cares how the site looks on THEIR machine, so I always ask what browser they use, and what their screen resolution is.

I feel it’s my job as the designer to make their site look good for as many scenarios as possible.

That’s why I really like fluid designs. I usually set min width, so if I’m using a horizontal nav I can prevent wrapping if the screen size gets too narrow, and max-width so line length doesn’t get too long at higher resolutions.

Personally, I look at the web at 1024 x 768, but I see lots of folks who look at it at 800 x 600 because they don’t understand that they can resize the text through the browser. So many sites use such a small font size for the body text that if you use reading glasses and such, you can’t see crap. But at 800 x 600 you can.

I’m also seeing more and more people looking at sites on their iPhone, iPod touch or their Crackberry. Fixed width sites can look pretty bad on those. Fixed width sites are much easier to create, but lots of people won’t have the optimum experience if they don’t look at the web like you do.

I guess it comes down to personal preference, the particular project, and how well you know the intended audience.

If only Min/Max Width was supported by all browsers - Looking at you IE :-(

Check out ie7.

IE7 is a JavaScript library to make Microsoft Internet Explorer behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many HTML and CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6.

You don’t even have to download anything. You just link to it. Sweet!