Thoughs on themes wider than 800px?

Use a fluid layout (have sidebar or sidebars more or less fixed and a flexible width content area that changes in different resolutions).

Good Response, Moshu. But I’m kind of a control freak and I hate fluid layouts.

Fluid layout is the only way to have your cake and eat it too.

So are you suggesting moshu to set the width of the page to 100%, and the sidebar to a fixed pixel width, and then setting the content to a %? how does that work?

Something like that. If the sidebar is fixed in px you don’t even have to define the content in %. Doesn’t the Classic work in a similar way?
I have even layout that has both the sidebar and the content in %.

I agree with Moshu.

Set left/right columns to 100px (or whatever suits your taste), and the center column will automatically resize to fit the available area.

Almost everyone I know (including parents) are up to 800×600 at least, and 95% of people I know are up to 1280×1024. For sake of keeping everything civil, I design my site to be 770 pixels wide (leaving room for scrollbars!) and everything dynamically fits inside that bounding box.

For those with a larger resolution, it gives a neat “sheet of paper on a table” effect that is familiar to most blogging atmospheres.

I could easily replace all my pixel references with % references, which would allow the page to dynamically fill the screen even at ultra-high resolutions, but I am also a design freak and I don’t want my pargraphs of text stretched out to be one line tall at 100101×150331 resolution. ??

I guess there a way to achieve this with a theme using graphics for a background? Like Kubrick or relaxation?

If so, it seems beyond my CSS skills.

J

No. K. is famous about being a sucker exactly for that fixed width bg image. As well as all its clones…
You either have a fixed width image… or you have a fluid layout.

In my mother tongue there is a saying that goes something like this: you cannot sit in two saddles with one ass ??

A very wise observation indeed. ??

Well, actually…. I think there’s a way to hack up the graphics in some themes to use just outers with a fluid inner; in fact, I used Claire Campbell’s flexi-float 3col on a site (not wp) – and while the graphics are used to display the columnar structure, the center content div is either fixed or fluid depending.

I’d suggest a trip through some of Claire’s layouts: https://tanfa.co.uk/