Adjusting your site for different Screen Resolutions

Have you ever spent hours trying to get your site to look just right and then viewed it on another PC at a different screen resolution?  If I design a site, I want to be sure that it stays the way I wanted it to look no matter what screen resolution the visitor is using.  How do you accomplish this?

Tables. 

Tables can be a web designer's best friend when it comes to achieving the perfect look. If you just want to make sure your site fits in all browsers you can set up a table set to 100% width and then put your content inside of it.  This will insure that it expands and grows to the width of the user's browser no matter what screen resolution they have.

If you want to be sure that your site stays the same in all screen resolutions then you would use tables and cells locked at a specific number of pixels to keep things from distorting.  

A few years ago it was good practice to always design for the most commonly used screen resolution - 640x480 but these days, most PCs come pre-set up for screen resolutions of 800x600 or higher.  One tip when using tables set to a specific number of pixels is to remeber to take into account that you don't have the full height and width of the browser to take advantage of. You have to account for the scroll bars, menu bars, tool bars etc.  For example, at 640x480 you may want to set your table to a width of 595.

An alternate way of doing this is to set up different pages and use a screen redirect script to redirect your users depending on their browser settings.