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Displays

Today's Average Screen Resolution? 200

Posted by Cliff from the remembering-320x200 dept.
ShadowDawn asks: "I'm looking to develop a website for average computer illiterate users and I'm just curious what the average users screen resolution is, now a days? I know 800x600 used to be the main size to develop for, but last I had seen 1024x768 was taking over. I was just wondering if anyone out there ran a 'normal' site that 'normal' people visit and would have some insight."
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Today's Average Screen Resolution? More

Today's Average Screen Resolution?

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  • It shouldn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)

    by orkysoft ( 93727 ) <orkysoft@m y r e a l b ox.com> on Friday December 23, 2005 @01:26PM (#14327253) Journal
    The funny thing is, resolution shouldn't matter much anymore. If you switch to a higher resolution, things shouldn't suddenly look a lot smaller, they should look sharper!

    • Re:It shouldn't matter (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "According to confidential Apple documents, resolution independent UI will not be a user level feature in Tiger, nor will it be exposed anywhere in the Tiger user interface. Instead, the company is providing early support of the technology to developers who wish to prep their applications ahead of time, or implement the feature on an individual application basis.

      "Documents state that, in future release of Mac OS X, users will be able to set a global resolution scaling factor in the same way that changes to
    • that is, if the designer did not use absolute values for their font size, right?

      • Advertisements that pay for the operation of a site are measured in pixels. So are images, which look ugly when scaled up or down with the nearest-neighbor algorithm that browsers based on IE and Mozilla use. SVG is scalable, but few web browsers support SVG out of the box, and in any case, photographic images cannot be straightforwardly converted to SVG. How can one make text fit properly around such pixel-sized boxes without using pixel sizes for the text so that neither overwhelms the other?

    • Making a high res monitor near useless, as all gained screen realestate is lost.

      the last thing I want is to maximize a windows and have it fill the whole (wide) screen with 10 lines of huge text.

      As it is now, when I maximize a window (in OSX) it expands to the width needed and two of them easily fit next to each other on a hi-res wide-screen
      • Which is why all the next generation GUI layers are aiming to be resolution independent. Tied to much higher res monitors this will allow you to have as much or as little real estate as you like.

        The glxcompmgr that comes with the experimental GLX XGL (names need work chaps ;) server is a real eye opener....
  • Aim for the stars!!!

    1600 x 1200 @ 75hz here on a Samsung SyncMaster CRT (LCDs suck for photo work).

    • 1600 x 1200 @ 75hz here on a Samsung SyncMaster CRT

      Same res @ 85Hz here, on a Hitachi CRT. Suck it. :)

      (hey, you asked for it)

      Totally cannot wait for LCDs or whatever flat panel technology to come out that's a) affordable, b) fast enough to not have ghosting issues, and c) true colour fidelity

      Someday, my prince will come...*sigh*
      • All three are pretty much here today. Unfortunately, it's hard to get both b and c for a super good price (a).
        • I haven't seen anything with both b and c yet, at any price. I guess that depends on what you mean by 'pretty much.' I'm wanting more of an absolute. :)

          If you have any product suggestions, please let me know; I haven't done much research on this in the last several months, so things may have changed.
      • Philips 200w6 20 inch "widescreeen" LCD monitor:
        a) affordable: 499 euros
        b) fast enough to not have ghosting issues: 8ms switching time
        c) true colour fidelity: OK, I do not have the specs for this, haven't read through the documentation yet.

        • b) fast enough to not have ghosting issues: 8ms switching time
          c) true colour fidelity: OK, I do not have the specs for this, haven't read through the documentation yet.

          See, that's the real trick - panels that have 8ms switching time don't tend to have true colour fidelity.
          • See, that's the real trick - panels that have 8ms switching time don't tend to have true colour fidelity.

            No monitor, at any price, has ever had "true color fidelity." The very fact that you think it's possible indicates that color doesn't matter enough to you to take the time to even understand it, much less need it.

  • ISP website - broad customer base (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23, 2005 @01:29PM (#14327263)
    We have about 50% at 1024x768 and about 20% at 800x600. The rest is a wide mix with the common ones being 1280x1024 and 640x480.

    • Re:ISP website - broad customer base (Score:5, Informative)

      by toddbu ( 748790 ) on Friday December 23, 2005 @02:05PM (#14327478)
      We run a commercial website and have similar stats. For all visitors, 1024x768 = 62%, 800x600 = 24%, 1280x1024 = 8%. We also track paying clients separately, and the numbers are 1024x768 = 55%, 800x600 = 26%, 1280x1024 = 10%. I'm always surprised to see the number of dual monitors that we see (2048x768), although the percentage of overall clients is really small.
      • Ok, I really hate to reply to my own comment, but I forgot to say something about viewports. A really important concept, especially for home pages, is the idea of "above the fold", taken from the newspaper world. It's the stuff that people see when first visiting your site that they don't have to scroll to see. It's where the really important stuff goes. Just because folks have 1024x768 screen resolution for their display doesn't mean that they'll see everything that you put out at that resolution. The

    • I host a mix of special interest sites, personal webpages, and a commercial site on my server. Mostly non-geek stuff. According to our webcounter, these are our users' resolutions and color depths for the last three months:

      39.3% 1024x768 @ 32bit
      11.9% 1280x1024 @ 32bit
      10.6% 800x600 @ 32bit
      9.7% 1024x768 @ 16bit
      6.3% unknown (javascript disabled)
      3.6% 800x600 @ 16bit
      3.5% 1152x864 @ 32bit
      3.4% 1280x800 @ 32bit
      1.6% 800x600 @ 24bit
      1.5% 1600x1200 @ 32bit
      1.5% 1024x768 @ 24bit
      1.3% 1280x1024 @ 16bit
      0.9%

  • Please don't... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jo42 ( 227475 ) on Friday December 23, 2005 @01:29PM (#14327264) Homepage
    Please don't force me to maximize my browser window just to noodle around your site(s). Do your HTML/CSS so that your web pages adjust with the size of the browser window. Please don't hard code table sizes in pixels and other such idiocies.

    • Re:Please don't... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by yobbo ( 324595 ) on Friday December 23, 2005 @02:12PM (#14327510)
      Amen to that.

      I increase the screen resolution so i have more space to move my windows as I please. It's not an open invitation to code a website to take every square cm available.

      Sites that are wider than 1000 pixels rarely find a place in my bookmarks.
    • One one hand I can agree with you, but on the other sometimes you have to force a certain minimum size. Or does the idea of three columns of text exactly one letter wide really appeal to you?

    • Do your HTML/CSS so that your web pages adjust with the size of the browser window.

      And watch images scale into a blocky mess when I do img#foo { width: 50% }. Or are you willing to finance the development of a Firefox extension and (more importantly) an IE extension to enable at least bilinear resizing for images? Get bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98971 resolved and I'll believe you.

  • Don't become too dependant on resolution... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by WTBF ( 893340 ) on Friday December 23, 2005 @01:30PM (#14327266)
    Why not just try to make the site work on a wide range of resolutions, as that way you will not be alienating that many people. It is not impossible to make a website that will stretch to large resolutions, and shrink to fit the smaller ones.

    Personally I think 1024x768 and 1280x1024 are the two important ones to make sure the site works properly at, as 1024x768 seems to be very popular, however 1280x1024 is the native resolution of a large number of TFT screens.
    • I personally like the sites I design to have a balance of white space between the layout (the actual site design) and the content. Hence I tend to fix my design so that it is relatively small about 780 pixels wide. That way when a client has a short page, with only a paragraph or two and someone on 1600x1200 maximizes the screen, the page is rendered so that it still looks like a couple of paragraphs, as opposed to a couple of sentences.

      If you don't have the content to fill the screen I believe it is bett

  • Flat Screens Have Reduced The Average Resolution (Score:3, Informative)

    by szyzyg ( 7313 ) on Friday December 23, 2005 @01:31PM (#14327273)
    I used to have 1600x1200 on everything, but none of my flat screens go that high - so the screen resolutions that people use have dropped a little from a couple of years ago when everyone was buying desktops with CRTs. I know a lot of people are even foregoing the desktop and just using a laptop instead, that's shrunk down the resolution as well.....
    • When I had a CRT, the highest it would go was 1280x1024.

      Then I got my SGI 1600SW flat panel, which was 1600x1000.

      Right now, I have a Cinema HD Display, which is 1920x1200.

      So you can see that my screen resolution has increased enormously with the advent of the LCD. I really want to get a 30" Apple Cinema Display, but I'm expecting to do a lot of travel and so my resolution may actually shrink to the 17" PowerBook's 1680x1050. However, note that this is still a bit higher than my highest CRT resolution was.
      • Sure some people may have increased, but one data point is not an average (unless it's the only data point!)
        The funny thing is that I'm on a 1280x1024 display at my office, and yet 5 years ago I had a Dell laptop with a 1400x1050 display
        • Heh. Yeah, laptops (at least Dell laptops) have typically been ahead of desktop LCD displays in terms of resolution.

          My Inspiron 8200 is 3 years old and 1600x1200 in a 15" screen, and my dad's I8000 was the same in terms of native resolution. My much newer Dell 1800FP is only 1280x1024 with a 18" screen.

  • The answer is ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by twoflower ( 24166 ) on Friday December 23, 2005 @01:31PM (#14327275)
    Some of your users will have huge 1600x1200 LCDs. Others will be running old hand-me-down 640x480 VGA monitors, or nice monitors with that stupid default resolution of Win95/98.

    But it doesn't matter. What you do is design your site in standards-compliant XHTML, using CSS for formatting (not tables), and let the user's browser render it however is best for that particular platform.

    Web designers (and I am one) should not be paying /any/ attention to "resolution".
    • Web designers (and I am one) should not be paying /any/ attention to "resolution".

      Surely the question isn't totally unreasonable. For example, say you have a 3072 x 2048 photo of a storefront that you'd like to have on a page. What's a good size for that to be reduced to?

      • Re:The answer is ... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by twoflower ( 24166 ) on Friday December 23, 2005 @02:30PM (#14327620)
        Surely the question isn't totally unreasonable. For example, say you have a 3072 x 2048 photo of a storefront that you'd like to have on a page. What's a good size for that to be reduced to?

        As large as it needs to be, and no larger:

        If that picture is not providing any useful information to the user (i.e., it's window-dressing, pun intended) and is merely a logo or other fluff, make it a few hundred pixels wide (200-400) and be done with it.

        On the other hand, if this picture is intended to show how meticulous your building-exterior-cleaning service is, it would make perfect sense to to default it to 800 pixels wide so that is has sufficient detail. A little clever CSS can even show a smaller version to viewers with smaller viewports than that.

    • What you do is design your site in standards-compliant XHTML ...

      XHTML has nothing to do with it (unless you're contrasting it to, say, building the entire website in Flash).

      Rest of the post is nice, though.

    • using CSS for formatting (not tables)

      That argument has nothing to do with using pixel width layout (I'm sure you know this, but many here won't; the programmer crowd and the web design crowd are two that don't have identical skillsets).

      Using CSS for _formatting_ - what kind of formatting? There are two things here: layout and style

      for layout, there are things you can do with tables that you cannot do well with CSS without resorting to hacks, browser-specific CSS, or even background images (to make things 'l

  • Stop that. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by irc.goatse.cx troll ( 593289 ) on Friday December 23, 2005 @01:33PM (#14327290) Journal
    Don't design for a resolution, thats just as bad as designing for ie. Make a webpage, *TEST IT* in 800x600, 1024x768, 1600x1200, whatever, but don't design it for something. It should work fine in all resolutions, not having half the page wasted on blank space, or text overlapping, or any other problem that comes from bad web developers saying "thats okay, it works in what I designed it for"

    • Re:Stop that. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by tepples ( 727027 )

      *TEST IT* in 800x600, 1024x768, 1600x1200, whatever, but don't design it for something. It should work fine in all resolutions, not having half the page wasted on blank space, or text overlapping, or any other problem that comes from bad web developers saying "thats okay, it works in what I designed it for"

      In 1600x1200, Slashdot's lines of text show up uncomfortably long. In a case such as this, should I just suggest that the user unmaximize the web browser window? And what should one do about the blank

  • I think your target audience should be a big factor. Do you see there being a good chance that elderly people with bad eye sight could be visiting it often? There are still a lot of people out there with 800x600 resolutions. If you develop at a higher screen res then you will look like you don't really know what you are doing in the eyes of those people and it is so easy to hit back and look through other google results that have a design more suited to them.

    On the other hand if you are developing someth

  • Just stop. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mrsbrisby ( 60242 ) on Friday December 23, 2005 @01:35PM (#14327303) Homepage
    Stop.

    Please.

    You are the bane of the web browser.

    Sites should be usable and viewable with any resolution with any web browser.

    We do not want an art exhibit, we want a web page. With stuff on it. Knowledge.

    I for example, frequently browse at 320 pixels across. I don't visit sites that don't work at that resolution. My employer uses his Treo frequently and has even worse to say on that.

    But my resolution? Well above 2000 pixels across.

    See, just because some web browsers (the users, not the programs) browse at full screen doesn't mean everyone does it.

    Web pages are not canvases- they do not have a size, and by artificially attempting to create one, you are doing the web a disservice.

    On the other hand, by treating them as such, chances are you have so little to say that it isn't useful at all in which case myself, and other web browsers simply won't visit your site.

    You will of course think it has something to do with the modernness of your design and make it even less usable.

    The cycle will continue.

    And nobody will notice.
    • "We do not want an art exhibit, we want a web page. With stuff on it. Knowledge."

      The problem is that most people who are paying to get a web site made want an art exhibit. They want it to look slick and fancy and professional. Stuff on it is an afterthought.
    • This coming from a guy who's site is "an all text experience"

      You asked a question about screen resolutions and said what you were planning on doing with the info gained. You weren't asking "What screen resolution should I design for?"

      You're the designer, I imagine you have a customer. Between you and the customer, decide what's best for you. If you're making a site for the benefit of the customer do what's best for yall. If it's for the visitor's benefit, do what's best for them.

      Just ignore the idealist
      • This coming from a guy who's site is "an all text experience" ...that satisfies more 40,000 unique visitors a month. And I don't even advertise, update, or do anything at all with it.

        Oh, I just provide content that apparently people are interested in.

        Between you and the customer, decide what's best for you.

        It's clear he cannot. He's asking slashdot about video resolution when he really means monitor size. Neither of these things have anything to do with gaining visitors- they only cost a site visitors.

        If

    • Re:Just stop. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ballwall ( 629887 )
      This kind of thinking is just naive.

      Is it possible to make a web site scale perfectly across all display sizes and browsers? Yes (well, maybe). Is it cost effective? Hell no.

      I do web design for a couple small artsy type sites, and their biggest criteria is style. They could care less if your employer's treo can display it properly, they want it to be pixel perfect in IE (I do test on gecko and khtml). A big part of distinguishing yourself from the competition is how professional your site appears to be. A
      • Is it possible to make a web site scale perfectly across all display sizes and browsers? Yes (well, maybe). Is it cost effective? Hell no.

        Prove it.

        I do web design for a couple small artsy type sites, and their biggest criteria is style

        I live in the real world. Companies put up websites to make money. Sometimes they do this by selling things, sometimes they do this by providing information so that they don't have to field phone calls.

        They could care less if your employer's treo can display it properly

        And tha
    • do keep in mind that decisions such as these are often not made by developers but by bosses and marketing departments. in my company, i've had many fruitless arguments with my boss about the merits of fixed vs. floating width designs. in the end, i've found that it's not worth the personal headache to fight my boss's stubbornness, and just design our site to the way he views it - which is with windows xp, running ie 6, with the google toolbar, at 1024x768 with the browser window maximized. he specifically d
      • do keep in mind that decisions such as these are often not made by developers but by bosses and marketing departments.

        Your employer is mentally retarded. That's why he hired you.

        Tell him that if he wants to design web pages, he can learn how to do it, otherwise he should leave it to professionals.

        developers know better

        Yeah, see, I've noticed that they don't. read the rest of the arguments in this thread: They don't know better. They're just as mind-blowingly stupid as your employer, and like your employer,

  • This page should be of help... (Score:4, Informative)

    by shadwwulf ( 145057 ) on Friday December 23, 2005 @01:36PM (#14327312) Homepage
    W3 Schools doesn't just include browser stats. They also track metrics regarding screen resolutions currently in use.

    http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp [w3schools.com]

    MTW

  • Fixed width is unnecessary (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bogtha ( 906264 ) on Friday December 23, 2005 @01:38PM (#14327330)

    Why do you want to know the screen resolution? That isn't going to tell you what the viewport size is. Non-maximised browsers, browsers with sidebars open, larger than default scrollbars... there's huge amounts of ways in which the viewport size can differ from the screen resolution.

    More importantly though, it sounds like you are trying to design a website with a fixed width. That's not necessary. Use percentages, and your layout will expand and contract to fit a wide range of viewports, without leaving an ugly and wasteful gap down the side in larger viewports and without forcing horizontal scrolling for smaller viewports.

    I'd like to pre-empt the people complaining that longer line-lengths are harder to read by pointing out that there's evidence to suggest that those studies, while perfectly fine for print, don't apply to computer displays, and in any case can be mitigated by using max-width in ems on <p> elements in a user or author stylesheet.

    I'd also like to pre-empt the people who say "but average users don't change the defaults!" by pointing out that, if true, would mean that the average user would be using a non-maximised browser window, as per Internet Explorer and Safari defaults.

    • I'd like to pre-empt the people complaining that longer line-lengths are harder to read by pointing out that there's evidence to suggest that those studies, while perfectly fine for print, don't apply to computer displays

      I think they do, i've got a widescreen with a definition of 1440x900 and if i certainly can't read sites with a lot of text for more than 5 minutes with a maximized browser...
      That's ok since the purpose of the thing is to have several windows opened on the foreground at the same time any

    • I'd like to pre-empt the people complaining that longer line-lengths are harder to read by pointing out that there's evidence to suggest that those studies, while perfectly fine for print, don't apply to computer displays

      I don't believe this for a moment. I can conceive of no reason why such a statement should be considered even remotely plausible. Please provide a good reference for your statement.
    • [problem] can be mitigated by using max-width in ems on <p> elements in a user or author stylesheet
      the max-width style does not work in IE: linky [w3schools.com]

  • Based on your audience (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MrResistor ( 120588 ) <.peterahoff. .at. .gmail.com.> on Friday December 23, 2005 @01:41PM (#14327351) Homepage
    If your intended audience is the average computer illiterate, you should probably expect plenty of people still operating at 800x600. I know a lot of people who are perfectly happy with their old K6-2 and crappy 15" monitor, and have no plans to upgrade while it still functions. It sounds like those people are your target demographic.

    That said, here is my opinion on the metatopic of which this is a part: If you don't clutter up your site with a bunch of unnecessary formatting crap, flash nonsense, menus, table, frames, etc., it won't matter what resolution your users are running at. HTML reformats itself to fit the display quite nicely as long as you web developers allow it to function as it was meant to.

    The vast majority of the time, "good design" means less stuff, not more.

  • oh boy... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Run4yourlives ( 716310 ) on Friday December 23, 2005 @01:42PM (#14327356)
    You're going to use a bunch of tables for presentation as well, aren't you?

    • You're going to use a bunch of tables for presentation as well, aren't you?

      Boy, you've got that right. With CSS and widths set to percentages I can't really think of why anyone would need to query for resolution size. It's very useful for handhelds and cell phones, but even then specifying another style sheet for those devices is best because tables don't work on many of those devices - again coming full circle to CSS and percentage widths. Hell, even image size (height and width) can be specified as a

  • I think most LCD displays are about 1280x1024 these days, so those users get a fuzzy display if they use anything else. During a quick walk through Office Depot, I noticed that they all but one of their dozens of LCD's were 1280x1024, as though they didn't expect anyone to pay for something bigger.

    Some users will keep using 800x600 for a long while though, because they have vision problems and not every app looks great if you select large fonts, or they don't know larger fonts are an option.
  • I suspect that 1024 x 768 is the most commonly used resolution out there especially if you factor in the millions of notebooks that are locked to that resolution. I agree with the suggestions of others that one shouldn't hardcode webpages to any specific resolution though.Let the user decide (or have the decision forced upon them by their hardware).

    I hope nobody will mind if I go off on a semi-related mini-rant about 1280 x 1024. It drives me nuts that so many LCDs use it as their native resolution becaus

  • Whatever you do, don't forget about us laptop users.

    My native resolution is 1280x800. Fixed width anything is going to look like garbage on my machine, as no one designs pages for widescreen aspect ratios.

    It's been said plenty of times before, but designing for a fixed resolution is a bad idea. This is just one of the reasons why.

  • I'm familiar with using client-size Javascript to query for screen resolution, and then doing something like making an http request for a file on the server tagged with the IP address (or better yet, some sort of unique ID tag) and that screen size so you can match them up ... and subsequently use that to tune pages for the size of the user's screen.

    What I would be curious to know is there any "pure" server-side solutions to determining screen resolution? I.e. if you are running CGI, you can query for stu

  • WWGD (Score:2, Funny)

    by planetjay ( 630434 )
    What Would Google Do?

    Seriously look at a website designed for your type of people. AO Lusers.

    You should expect whatever the computer came with (probably 800x600) with EVERY TOOLBAR EVER INVENTED. Plus a search side bar taking up about 1/3 of the left side. Oddly enough, those people hate surfing the net.

  • Please test with different font sizes (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Matt Perry ( 793115 ) <perry DOT matt54 AT yahoo DOT com> on Friday December 23, 2005 @02:29PM (#14327608)
    As others have said, you should design for any size screen. I would also like to encourage you to test your site with different browser font sizes. For people such as myself who are visually impared, being able to change our font size to something larger is very imporant.

    When sites are designed using a fixed width such as 800x600, the layout aften depends on assuming a small font size so that elements align properly. My banking site is one such web site. When the font size is increased, elements can overlap to shift to the next line, losing some of the contextual imformation of their placement. At worst the elements may be overlapped by other elements thereby obscuring whatever it is that you needed to see. I see this happen often with navigation items.

    My recommendation is that while you are designing your site, use the keyboard shortcuts for font increase and decrease in Firefox to test and make sure that the page looks as expected. Another option would be to create another Firefox profile with the font set to 20 points and the minimum font size set to 14. This is what I use in my Firefox settings. I have a small laptop screen with a resolution of 1400x1050 which, when combined with my poor eyesight, has made a font size like this required for easy reading.

    I also want to stress that if the layout of the page breaks a bit, that is fine. Most users that browse with a large minimum font size are used to seeing the page mess up a bit. There are sites such as Slashdot and Wikipedia that continue to look fine at any font size. Others might be using absolute positioning for DIVs and may have navigational and other elements obscured when the font is large. The important thing is to make sure that the elements on your page that make it functional still work. If something isn't aligned correctly but it's not a big deal, don't worry about it. If the navigation is only partially visible because of the larger font size, then you should fix that. For example, last.fm [www.last.fm] has some display problems when a larger font size is used, but nothing that impeeds navigation or general usability.

    Finally, let me stress that you should avoid specifying your font sizes using a fixed method such as pixels or points [useit.com]. Instead, please use a relative font size such as "x-small", ems, or a percentage. There are still many users that use IE. IE will not resize fonts that use a fixed specification such as pixels and points, even when the font size option in the browser is changed from the default.

  • I don't know if you're one of those people designing web sites with microscopic fonts in a tiny strip, but if you are I should point out that most of the time I avoid your sites.

    On the rare occasions that Google leads me to your site for some information that I critically need I hold down the Control key and tap the + sign three or four times to make your fonts readable. Wow does you're layoug f*cking suck reading a couple words per line across a tiny column pinched between obnoxious adds and pointless usel

  • I have your answer (Score:3, Insightful)

    by alta ( 1263 ) on Friday December 23, 2005 @02:35PM (#14327653) Homepage Journal
    Looking at google analytics for vadiumgroup.com I can see the following

    58% 1024*768
    17% 1280*1024
    14% 800*600
    1% below 800*600
    10% above 1280*1024.

    So, looks like if you built for 1024 you'd safe for 85% of the market, not bad.

    Now this is no excuse to make a site that's unuseable at 800*600. You can use percentages almost everywhere and have your design scale for all resolutions.
    • And BTW, the site is visited by Mortgage brokers. This is a VERY average demographic. These are non-technical people. They range in age from 20ish to 70's. They are spread geographically. Their financial status also varies greatly (some are good, others aren't)

    • So, looks like if you built for 1024 you'd safe for 85% of the market, not bad.

      Designing something to have a detrimental effect for 15% of your visitors is "not bad"? I disagree.

      Furthermore, even if the statistics you mention are accurate, the fact that the website those statistics are for is fixed width must surely have at least some bias. It could be that you have a disproportionately low number of low-res visitors for this very reason, in which case it's like saying "I don't need to fix my webs

    • Looking at google analytics for vadiumgroup.com I can see the following

      Except, those assume everyone browses in kiosk mode (fullscreen, with no toolbars or menus or sidebars or the like).

      Very, very few people browse like that.

      Personally, I use FF with the status bar, the menu, the URL bar, the Bookmarks Toolbar, and the tab bar alwasy visible, with no sidebars. But I don't let the browser take up my entire screen horizontally, either (I end up with something like a square 900x900 area for the content
    • If you want to collect your own stats on this, the javascript looks something like:

      colors = window.screen.colorDepth;
      if (navigator.appName == "Netscape")
      {
      width = window.innerWidth;
      height = window.innerHeight;
      }
      else
      {
      width = document.body.clientWidth;
      height = document.body.clientHeight;
      }
      document.write ("<img style=display:none src=/cookies/?w=" +width blah blah);

      That gets us a hit to a script which l

  • I recently saw a site talking about typography for the web, and it stated that there is an 'ideal' width for lines of text, about 66 characters. Now, with CSS, you can specify in ems (the width of a capital M in whatever font/size you're looking at). So, specify text areas widths in ems to make it more readable - I haven't designed any new sites since I read this, but it seems very interesting.

    CSS also had max-width and min-width options (that of course don't work in IE; hopefully in IE7) that one can make

  • I still develop for 800x600 desktops, mainly because I know not everybody runs a browser with max width. As well, you can also consider fluid layouts, which are usually harder to develop artistically, but they flow well.

    The big issue I've run into is font sizes, especially with images; I wish all browsers had Opera's zoom feature. I've had people preach em sizings to the masses, but sometimes it is better aesthetically to define sizes in px (especially in non-fluid layouts).

    Still, you also have to con

  • Screen Resolution (Score:3, Funny)

    by pipingguy ( 566974 ) on Friday December 23, 2005 @03:17PM (#14327886)

    2560x1024. Please make pages wider.
  • There, I said it. Make your design work at any resolution from 640x480 to 1600x1200, and any aspect ratio. I have a 1280x1024 screen - but I never enlarge my browser beyond 1024x768 because I like to have extra cascading room.

  • You don't want the average, no matter what you think. I can guarantee you that none of your users will have the average screen resolution (which is probably something like 1143.1814 x 869.6295). In fact, I'd bet all of them will be (some integer) x (some integer) where neither integer is particularly close to the average.

    --MarkusQ

  • Dear fixed-width naysayers:

    if you've ever done real-world web design that requires graphics, you'll realize this is a very important concern. If possible of course you'll want to make your website as scalable as possble. But just as different browsers behave differently (not just IE) and you have to sometimes find a good median solution, you need to do that with screen size, as well. And when you include graphics suddenly percentages go out the window, since many browsers won't resize images very nicely. B

  • Sub VGA (Score:2)

    by rlp ( 11898 )
    Don't forget 240x320. That way your site will be accessible to WiFi connected PDA users.

  • 80 columns x 33 lines. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Richard Steiner ( 1585 ) <rsteiner@visi.com> on Friday December 23, 2005 @04:58PM (#14328577) Homepage Journal
    Seriously. I do most of my browsing via Links 0.99 on a 21" monitor in text mode.

    I tend to use either 1600x1200 or 1280x1024 on GUIs, but that also varies (some of my older 17" monitors are limited to 1024x768).
  • Sometimes design is about achieving an objective, not catering to everyone at once...

    When I get paid $60,000.00 to design an effective website whose objective is to grab your attention and get you to do something you may not have considered until you see the site.. well, standards compliance is not at the top of my list.

    Sure it would be nice to do both but often the extra time it takes to make an approved creative design using standards based semantically accurate code JUST ISN'T IN THE BUDGET and often the

  • An annoyingly contrary view (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Watts Martin ( 3616 ) <layotl&gmail,com> on Friday December 23, 2005 @05:15PM (#14328700) Homepage
    I see a lot of "if you're a good web designer, you won't care about resolution, and you'll be smart enough to make your sites resolution-independent" kind of comments in this mix here. Yeah, there's something to that. The web isn't the same as the printed page, after all.

    But you'll notice that many--not most, but I'd honestly say the majority--of professionally-designed web sites that are text-heavy do use a fixed width for text blocks. Despite what some people here seem to think, sites that do that are not designed by ignorant graphic designers too stupid to use good design principles. They're designed by graphic designers smart enough to know that "the web isn't the same as the printed page" doesn't mean that everything we've learned in centuries of typography and layout is merrily tossed out.

    One of the basic rules of typography is that line length affects readability. You can play around with the length for various effects, but a block of text that's wider than about 39 ems and longer than a paragraph or two is going to be harder to read. This still applies on the screen.

    There's an implicit attitude among a lot of hardcore tech types that graphic design doesn't involve actual work -- we're just sitting around stapling Dreamweaver templates over your glorious PHP, and that any design decisions we make that aren't The Way Engineers Would Do It are proof that we're clueless. I'm sorry you guys resent any use of the web that couldn't have been done in HTML 2.0, but it's time to take your hands off the VAX keyboard and back away slowly.

    I agree that when you're designing a web page, you shouldn't be thinking too much about the user's screen resolution, but the reality is that I'm probably not going to be designing my page so it will fill up your 2048x1536 display; I'm going to be designing my page so it's going to be readable on your 2048x1536 display. And that may just mean designing for a specific width. Get over it.
  • Why? Because even if I have more screen real estate doesn't mean I want *you* to control it. When I surf, I usually have several windows open, and applications, too. A web site that requires my whole screen blocks my view of the other apps and web sites and, frankly, that just pisses me off.

    I don't visit sites that assume they are more important than anything else that I might be doing.
  • Ans: 480x320

    Recently I installed wifi at home for my wife's T5 and since then she does about 80% of her browsing on that. It can be a great experience on well designed sites or sites that are handheld specific, but on sites which assume an 800 or 1024 pixel-width, ahem!, I don't normally use that kind of language.

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