With the every increasing monitor sizes available today, it has never been more important to make sure your website will look the same on all monitors.
It is still safe to say that the most commonly used screen size is 1024 wide by 768 high, although some people still use 800 wide by 600 high. Although they are a dying breed and with technology prices falling, laptops and desktop screen becoming ever larger you should try your site on a variety of monitor sizes.
One thing to keep in ming when designing your layout is a term known as "below the fold", put simply this means that at the time of loading anything a user can see on your website is "above the fold" and any content a user has to scroll to see is "below the fold". This is an expectable way to show content, especially when you have lots of text articles or similar.
HOWEVER
You must design your page so that it is not wider than the users screen, people do not want to scroll across to read content. So if you have to make your site not as wide and make it longer, but avoid side scrolling content.
You may be thinking "How do I test my content in a variety of size? I only have one monitor" well other than messing with your computer display settings, there are a number of ways to do this. The easiest is to use one of the many website tools out there to aid your design.
Here are a couple of tools I use to test website design
1. Web Confs - Web Page Screen Resolution Simulator
2 Google Labs - Browser Size Tool
So remember when testing to make sure everyone can see all your hard work.
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