12 Responses to “Global Screen Resolutions”  

1. 1 tollie williams on Jun 25th, 2006 said:

   Personally, I design for a maximized window at 800×600. To require a visitor to take up an entire 1024×768 screen just to visit my site seems rather selfish. I believe web designers should be courteous to their users and allow them to keep an eye on other windows while they’re browsing.

2. 2 rob on Jun 25th, 2006 said:

   tollie, I understand and agree. But I guess I’m wondering…if it’s only 12% of your audience, well, at what percentage would one finally decide to switch?

   When did it go from 640 to 800?

3. 3 tollie williams on Jun 25th, 2006 said:

   I believe I have already switched. To me, designing for 800×600 maximized is more about allowing the 1024×768 crowd to keep some extra space to see other windows, and less about the compatibility for older video modes.

   If the question becomes, when do we alienate the 800×600 crowd by going bigger in order to please the 1280 and up? I don’t know. For now, even at 1280, I feel like common widths (c. 500 pixels of blog a sidebar, or 800 pixels of ’stuff’) are plenty wide to be both aesthetic and functional.

   Finally (and thanks for your reply, BTW), I think I made the switch from 640×480 about the time that we saw common adoption of Windows XP, as it removed 640×480 from the standard choices of video modes. That, of course, was before the common adoption of LCD monitors which have native resolutions; now it seems the size and affordability of LCD monitors will drive our lowest common denominator.

4. 4 sheldon on Jun 25th, 2006 said:

   Don’t forget that there is a difference between a screen resolution and a window width. Even with my 1920×1280 screen, I browse at about 900 px wide.

   I like to have my sage extension open and a couple of lines of icons on my desktop available at all times. I also have a few Yahoo Widgets open on the right hand side.

   If you design for 1024, make sure your right hand column is not important information or you will still lose a number of your visitors viewing it.

5. 5 Tony whittaker on Jun 26th, 2006 said:

   I personally prefer a liquid layout that expands or contrcts to whatever the resolution. Of course, those with VERY high screen resolutions almost certainly do not use their browsers full width

6. 6 Jeremy on Jun 26th, 2006 said:

   I agree with Tollie, if we design to 800×600, meaning that we fill the entire screen at that resolution, we still have the nicely colored border for higher resolution users. As someone we has his resolution set to 1600×1200, I can tell you that I don’t browse with my browser maximized. I like this resolution because I can have a lot more windows open at one time.

7. 7 rob on Jun 26th, 2006 said:

   These are excellent points! Thanks!

8. 8 djchuang on Jun 26th, 2006 said:

   By designing for 800×600, you’d get almost 100% coverage vs. 88% coverage — if you designed for 1024×768 screen rez. And like a few others have said, by designing for the 800×600 size, you give those with a larger screen rez more “white space” and visual breathing room.

9. 9 Russ McGuire on Jun 28th, 2006 said:

   Guess what?

   There’s a whole new world about to crash into this topic. As folks increasingly want to take their web world mobile, new device form factors are going to cause us to have to accomodate reasonable usability in very small screen sizes. I wrote a post on this topic a while ago here, and there’s another somewhat related post here that might bring back memories for those of us that have been developing content for the Internet for a few years.

   Think about cellphones, about devices like “gameboys” with WiFi, about devices like the new Origami/UMPC, etc. Your #s 1,2,4,5 above only account for about 80% of users. 12% are 800 wide, but another 8% are something else entirely…

10. 10 tollie williams on Jun 28th, 2006 said:

    Russ, you have a good point. I think the solution for that is already here in the separation of layers that CSS has made possible. By keeping markup driven by content, we’ve become a really accessible web, and XHML2 is set to make that even more so.

11. 11 tollie williams on Jun 28th, 2006 said:

    Goofed: XHTML2

12. 12 sheldon on Jun 28th, 2006 said:

    Don’t forget, content written for the web was different than content written for print. Content written for phones will have to be different than that of the web as no matter how nice they make the screens, phones, treos, blackberry’s etc will be smaller screens with lower resolutions.

    In our experiments with mobile sites and from my own use of trying to browse with my Sony Ericsson Z600 using Opera Mini 2.0, I’m looking for minimal clicking and small doses of content.

    Yes, CSS and XHTML especially XHTML 2 will allow us to repurpose content but we’ll need smaller doses of content too.

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