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if you make the window too wide, you have to move your head back and forth to read

I don't know if this made it into the release or if it's just in the beta - but you can move your eyes left to right without moving your head! Also you could just sit a reasonable distance from the monitor so you can see it all at once - I have no problems doing this on a 21" widescreen.

Chrome doesn't seem to allow me to switch to another window by hovering the mouse over that window's taskbar button while dragging a tab - which makes the feature nearly useless if you use maximized windows.

Most web site designs nowadays are tested against window widths of 800 to 1000 pixels. Many of them are "liquid", meaning that the width of the main text area resizes with the width of the window; on these, if you make the window too wide, you have to move your head back and forth to read. Others just put blank bars at the sides if your window is too wide. So unless you use a small screen, such as that of an older PC or a subnotebook PC, why would you use maximized windows with a web browser?

http://webstyleguide.com/index.html

Web Style Guide covers these things well, I don't know why it's so overlooked.

You've touched upon two very different topics: design and programming. Making a website look professional requires a whole different skillset than writing the backend.

If you want to design websites, take a class on graphic design and be sure to read the Yale Site Style Guide. Also be sure to work on those Photoshop and Fireworks skills.

As far as all the backend stuff goes, get some good books on PHP and MySQL, which will quickly get you going.

Some random "web development" site

Scroll down a bit to get to the chars per line bit

All of these basically agree that more than 80 chars per line is quite hard to read.

Most style guides suggest using a fixed width page of around 600 pixels. For example:

this one

I know. It sucks on a big screen.

First, why ask /.? Wouldn't this be better posed to a group that knows something about graphic design? IANAGD (graphic designer), but I'm currently studying digital design and reading books on the subject. The following is basically lifted from > type < for the internet and other digital media by Veruschka Gotz and the Web Style Guide.

The problem with graphic designers used to working with paper is that the lower resolution of the screen severely reduces the legibility of fonts. You basically have to take off one or two points to get a paper-equivalent font size. Since the wife's employer KNOWS that the elderly tend to buy his wine, it behooves her to 1. obey the desires of the client and 2. design for the audience.

I would think a nice 12pt sans or a 14pt serif would do for the body copy. Be sure to keep the lines short and up the leading (css2 property: line-height) to at least 120% and possibly up the letter spacing (letter-spacing). The resulting text takes up a lot of screen space but is considerably easier to read.