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We have a website through a vendor that we iframe the heading over and there are both fixed and full width containers/elements on the page. The site is just 100K internal users at our company. Sorry if this question has been asked before but I couldn't find it.

I am simply looking for what is the max width I can go for a fixed page in 2015? Given we have little to no usage of this site on tablets and the main purpose of this site is analytics and research - almost everything is done on company laptops.

We are currently running a lot of other internal sites (however not as large or as used) at 1380px. Why 1380px? No idea. I know that 5-6 years ago 980px was the norm. Can I go to 1380px? Could I push it further without running into problems? What is the new fixed width max?

Edit: I see the downvote so will add more info. We have 100K in almost every country in the world. I have collected data. Most - 80-90+% - probably could support at least 1500px wide. The feedback we get from surveys is that people want as much screen filled as possible. So is it OK to make the 10-20% of the people have to scroll sometimes?

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  • If you know that you have a limited, internal user base, try to collect some information on what screen sizes are in use. Do people tend to use the site alongside another window? – Phillip Quintero May 28 '15 at 21:57
  • If it's fixed-width, then it's not really semi-responsive. – DA01 May 28 '15 at 22:20
  • If it's an internal application, website then you can send out a survey across the company for users to select what's the screen size they are using. – Ameen Akbar May 29 '15 at 2:25
  • @DA01 - there are parts of the app that are responsive - the parts I built. But 50-60% of the pages have some sort of fixed width somewhere. Think taking 5-6 different applications and plugging them together where you could have 1-4 of them displaying on the same page based on what the user is doing. – blankip May 29 '15 at 2:49
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There are few things to consider here

Prioritization (Does your 20% users who don't have wide screens matter to you or not)

NO: If your 20% users who have low res screens doesn't matter then you can make the bold step and keep it around 1400px wide.

YES: Now if you want to cater for all the users or at-least 99% of them then i would suggest you should consider this

1) Use a block/Google card style layout. Keep the most important data/blocks on the top and move the rest to the bottom (for scrolling) on smaller screen sizes.

2) Second option could be that you can hide text from navigation icons/elements and show them only when user hovers over it.

3) One more idea is horizontal scrolling with pagination. Once user is on a small screen, show pagination controls or a slider to show the right side content or a button saying "Load more" but it must be noticeable

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Nothing you said in your question can be used to answer the question other than the fact that you are using 1380px for your other pages. The reason is, we don't know the content. What if the only content was one word, "Hi!". Then 1380px is a lot of wasted space. Unless it's an artistic decision, in which case 1380px might be too small!

A web page is responsive or it's not. It either adjusts to the device or it doesn't. If you want a fixed width for the company laptops, find out what size the company laptops are and adjust the content to fit the width. If you're using 1380px everywhere else then I presume that's a good number to shoot for.

If all this is nothing but a guess, and we're just guessing here on this board, then breakpoints are, typically, 980/1024/1280/1440 and up.

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Your breakpoints should be based on your content. As soon as you have too much whitespace or things are getting crammed, add a new point and shuffle your elements. You can't hope to account for all possible resolutions now and to the future.

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