PSD design & size/resolution question Options

[Armatur]

I am in the process of hiring someone to design a PSD from a rough mock up I created. I tend to like fairly wide looking site design like these:

http://collisionlabs.com/

http://www.grapeandgrainliquors.com/

http://completeroofing.ca/

I am confused as to what I need to know in order to tell the PSD designer what size I would like the page designed in so I'm hoping someone here can help. We get about a quarter of visitors using 1024x768 quarter using 1280x1024 and the rest a mixture of bigger and smaller as far as resolution but I don't really know anything about how the PSD should be designed as far as size and how it will look so any guidance you have would be greatly appreciated. I am also confused about fixed width and fluid issues and perhaps that is dependent on the other question so if you're a design genius, maybe you can guide me.

Thank you so much!

[Darin McGrew]

The best advice I've seen is to optimize your layout for the most common widths of browser windows (which is not the same thing as resolution), but to make sure it adapts to other widths that are both smaller and larger than that.

Photoshop may be a great tool for creating/editing images. However, web pages are not images.