[backoffbitch]

Personally I find that people designing freesites that are width scalable are generally designing sites that look like shit. Not all do though, some scale nicely and still look good but a majority of scalable freesite designs have elements spread out way too thin and everything looks empty to me. Like they were designed in 1995.

As for general design that incorporates graphical headers, I think 770px wide is the way to go. You cant scale a jpg or a gif. it just doesn't work that way. I've used layering and css to make elements scalable in graphical headers but it's still spread too weird and doesn't work when it's a centered design. To allow the body of the page to scale and the header to sit still is doable. Just depends on how you build your header. Left or right justify the header and allow it to scale over a background image that suits it, and you're good to go.

Overall though, 770px wide is perfect, it's compact, to the point, everything is easy to access without much effort on anyone's part and it keeps banner happy designers in check... well.. for the most part. It is a bit limiting on placement of elements though. Personally I'm starting to get damn tired of the simple middle single column or one column on the side design. More than that and you lose valuable real estate. So I use CSS a lot now to put columns where they fit nicely and control text wrapping to work around it. It works well for scalable designs too but for my bitching-galleries blog I went back to 800x600 to keep things simple and controllable when it comes to images and such.