Judging from the CS-SIS Roundtable I participated in at the AALL Annual Meeting, there are a lot of law librarians currently engaged in large-scale redesigns of their library websites. If, like me, you're constantly banging your head against a wall over the issue of page width, you'll probably want to check out Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox column, Screen Resolution and Page Layout.

Nielsen's summary:

Optimize Web pages for 1024x768, but use a liquid layout that stretches well for any resolution, from 800x600 to 1280x1024.

According to Nielsen, "60% of all monitors are set at 1024x768 pixels," while "only about 17% use 800x600." The best news of all? "Fewer than half a percent of users still have 640x480."

(Thanks to Roger Fenton for posting a link to Nielsen's column on the Web4Lib listserv.)