Not restricted to Dreamweaver necessarily 
You would specify the widths in your stylesheet, so it wouldn’t matter which html editor you use.
Nadia
760 x 480 is still the industry standard.
I work for 3 different development companies and all I do all day long is design websites. I always start out with a 760 px wide canvas in photoshop, but then depending on how the design goes determines the ending width of the canvas.
I don’t like it when my designs begin to look similiar. I try to make them all different so I would never say a website needs to be this width or that width. Just talk to your client and see what their needs our.
That’s the most important factor - the wishes of the client … though in some cases they may need a little bit of educating
Nadia
On small/low-resolution monitors, most people will probably maximise their browser windows. The larger the monitor and the higher the resolution, the lower this probability becomes (unless the user has a visual impairment and wants to have extra large text).
Yeah, like me :(. Take my glasses away and I’m literally blind as a bat.
I think of it as your target audience. Are you making a website for gamers that probably have big monitors? Or is the a small church website? That is how I determine website sizes.
As the majority of users in the uk still use 800x600 as their screen resolution the uk standard is actually 760x420 for the index page of any website this ensures that your page displays completely without having to scroll down whatever resolution is being used. On the rest of the pages I just use a width of 760 but the height is determind by what content is on the page.
r937 has it right here. The user could have their browser window reduced, not everyone uses full screen. Also, lots of people have their resolution running lower than their monitor supports because they get bigger text and icons. My parents for example, and many of my older aged clients. There are lots of reasons to still support lower resolutions!
Best bet (in my opionion) is to support a minimum resolution of 800x600 (i like 760px wide) and if you want to support larger resolutions then just make sure that users on 800x600 can still view and use the site comfortably.
Always design for a screen resolution of 800x600px.
It’s safer and still common.
I usually optimize for 800 x 600 monitors.
less than or equal to 785px, it looks ugly for 800x600 users if its larger than 790 or so
Almost all of the sites that I have designed are between 700 and 800 px wide. Long time ago I used to use % but not any more.
780 is good for width for length there is no real regulation. Its annoying having to do 780 max wide layouts. 800x600 resolutions should be made illegal.
780x600 is the size i always use. And coconut i agree with you. Its changing though, I think more people are using 1024x768 now.
I make mine 748px wide and add ~15px gap at the top so that it looks equal all the way around. The height doesn’t matter since all pages scroll with content.
I do not use a percentage based layout because the demographic we attract want to see a highly graphical layout and there’s about 15% in 800x600.
Generally we think about supporting smaller screens but few years ago I was in front of a 21" monitor set to very high resolution and most of the sites were looking funny and unreadable.
I have very little experience with 21s and would like to hear about that if you are using one.
Width:100% – never fails
Dreamweaver defines 760x420pixels to fit in 800x600 window - but for my tastes I tend to go a little taller to 760x450pixels.
This is the eternal debate when it comes to web design, this ones been knocking around for years!! The big thing to remember is you are trying to make the site useable by as many visitors as possible… over which you have no control!
There is certainly a-lot of evidence that 800x600 is falling by the wayside now, and the stats of the websites I track is heavily reflecting this - 1024x768 is a much more universal screen resolution for computers bought in the last couple of years (and higher spec ones that are older). Of-couse, as time has moved on not only have screen resolutions got higher, but so have the range of devices that people are viewing websites on… I have been using my Pocket PC/Phone to view websites for the last couple of years, and some render better than others it has to be said, but this is a very small minority!
I think for at-least another 12 months designers should accomodate all their main content and navigation within a width of 760pixels, and use extra screen for non-essential sidebars that accomodate a width of around 900pixels.
One final word on fluid designs - they are great, and I used to strive to achive good fluid designs that scaled to browser window. Have you ever seen a fluid design on a widescreen or high resolution (1600x1200) display… unless you have a max width control you can end up with veeeeeeeery long lines to read that are far more visually unpleasant and harder on the eyes to read than a fixed width design, but each to their own!
Thanks to everybody there was some good advise here.
I try to stay no larger the 775px wide.