Originally Posted by fnacotton

I have google analytics running on every website I've ever made. The percentage of users using 800 x 600 is 4.29%. That includes a high school's website that gets 300 visitors a day that are across a diverse portion of the population.

1024 x 768 makes up 47% of the population. The rest are above that, except for 1% of users who visit on an iphone, but that scales so it doesn't matter.

I design my sites 900 pixels wide. If 4% of my audience has to scroll horizontally I don't care. 900 pixels is optimal because it still leaves some space on each side of the content, but I'm not just wasting space.