[robot180]

I think some of us are getting a bit carried away with this. Two people told me in the last week that I am a really great web designer so I feel that I should share my knowledge.

Think about it this way, put yourself in the user's shoes. Again, I don't mean to criticize you, but that is the whole point of this.
Example:

You are making a website that sells stuff. (like Amazon.com) You set a list of goals for the website and make a general plan/design of how the website will work; what each page will do, the general theme and navigation bar etc., and how information/products will be organized on the website. Since this will be a complex website, you want to do the least amount of coding as possible.

Now, let's look at it from the user's perspective. A possible customer comes to your website. They are looking to buy some products that are worth a total of $100. It costs your company $80 to get the products. If the sale goes through, you will make $20. (Let's say you charge them for shipping seperatly.) You set up the page that contains the links to all of the products that the customer is looking for, but the page is set for no left/right scrolling in a 1024x768 browser. However, this person has, I don't know...lower vision from old age. Therefore, they set it to 800x600, and get the left/right scroll bar. Let's say the descriptions for the products goes off the screen and they have to scroll right and back left and right again to read each line. After the first two or three products, they may get tired and only buy about $20 worth of products that costs you about $18 to get. (since you are not buying in as much bulk) You only make $2 compared to the $20 just for making your pages a little narrower, which isn't really that hard. Now, don't forget that if thousands of people go to your site every day, this could happen maybe about 50 times a day. Which means that you loose $18 times about 50, every day. That adds up to a lot of money.

Maybe that helped, if not it may have helped someone else. The moral of the story is a quote, something that my web design teacher always says, "REMEMBER YOUR AUDIENCE". This is very true. Make your website accessable to as many people as you can. You can't always make it accessible to everyone, but the more, the better. Put yourself in the user's shoes and think about what they want.