Full width site? Lots of products to sell

I’ve noticed most websites use static layouts for 1024 pixel resolution.
Designers seem to think if people have a full HD monitor theres no point in using extra space.

Any comments on layout width?

Amazon has a really great system.
You can resize your browser window, and it automatically re-tiles the display area with products to fit.
What technology are they using for moving the DIVs around?
This might be a bit too fancy for me right now. I might just detect browser resolution when the page loads and align stuff at that point in time.

If you put each of your items in a div with specified widths and float all the divs to the left, they will automatically move up to fill the space when you resize.

A very simple way is to use floats or inline-block (although floats can get messy when the items aren’t all the same height. See http://gybo.org.uk/photos for a very simple example of a page where the items flow and fill the available space. No, you can’t do anything too sophisticated, but for a simple way of filling the page efficiently, it’s a good place to start.

Generally best practices (from what I know) are to make what’s called a responsive web design meaning, basically, that the website will respond to what the user is using (in your case, screen resolution). This is most commonly done w/ the use of a [url=http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fluidgrids/]fluid grid or fluid site.

For Amazon, as Stevie and WebMachine noticed, the site was made w/ floats (or at least, it seems to be).

~TehYoyo