ecommerce: optimal width

Question

I am going to redesign an ecommerce shop. Currently the shop has the standard 940px width.

I was wondering if 940px/960px is still the recommended width? Nowadays we have responsive grids and bigger displays. I am thinking of expanding the width to 1200px and introducing an adaptive grid for tablet users.

Any ideas on how this affects UX?

Answer 1

The best answer, as always is "it depends".

1200px will not be too wide if your measure remains within the optimal range of 45-75 characters per line. Of course, if your design incorporates multiple columns then you can safely go way beyond that, though for multi-column layouts the optimal measure should be reduced to something like 40-50 characters.

Just set the width of your design according to the content it must contain, not just to some arbitrary number which has no relevance to your content.

Why not just do something like this?:

[role="main"] {width: 90%; max-width: 65em;}