Honesty folks, do we need to think of designing for 800x600 screens or has 800x600 become like 640x480 - that is - no one uses it anymore? I find 800x600 very restricting, and yet, without knowing general stats regarding how many folks out there are still using 800x600 I really cannot justify dropping that resolution. This is not my website, but for a client, and I am trying to find some stats/info to convince her than 800x600 is dead. So what do I tell her to let me out of the 800x600 jail? Thanks a lot.
According to what i've seen and heard there still is a need to design for 800x600 although I also dislike it. I prefer to design for the larger screen but it restricts some visitors to my sites/design so I can't really do it too frequently. According to the w3's visitor stats for January 2007, 14% of their visitors were using 800x600, down from 17% during July of last year. That is still a large share of visitors so it'll most likely be unwise to design for 1024 instead. Stats: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp Scroll down to Display Resolution. But of course that data may be misleading because of who your site aims to attract. Alot of the computers at my old school used to use 800x600 whilst able to use higher resolutions, and it seems that people just like to hmm, stick to it?
I think it depends on your target audience. If you are designing a website for users that are more techy then you can design for 1024.
Why not design a site that fits ALL resolutions? All you need to do is set your tables in % instead.. so width=%100 to fill up the whole screen.. then everyone will be happy..
Mostly I design for 800x600 since there are 10%+ people using this resolution ! It is easy to do so with fluid designs but fixed width like 780px is good also .....
Don't be fooled by screen resolution. Only the less productive users run their applications maximized. The larger screens allow the power user to have multiple apps in view. An 800px width for browsers is about ideal in terms of readability. It allows for a main content area that's about 60–70 characters in width plus a narrower sidebar. I'm looking forward to moving to a 2560×1440px monitor so I can tile four apps and still have room for the more important start-up icons on the desktop to be visible. cheers, gary
I agree. I design my fixed tables around 800 as well. If you are going to go for a fixed table... then smaller is better than making it too much bigger (it would be so annoying for those with smaler screen resolution.. if not, go with my other solution
Depends on project, of course. I would never consider designing a gamers or webmaster related website for a 800x600 screen or lower. And if my stats ever point to an important number of PDA or mobile browser usage, I would then rather consider creating a separate simplified design for that category of surfers. Optimizing a single design for all screen resolutions is not always a perfect idea IMO. Websites related to bets, online tickets, bookings, they should be optimized to any screen however. Their target visitors and customers have most chances of using a mobile phone or a low resolution computer to load your website.
so what if yahoo doesn't support it ? It is not like they are some kind of reference As I see the biggest search engine still supports 800x600 and lots of users still have that resolution. More than 10% of visitors to my sites have it so ..... what to do with those thousands of visitors ? Just ignore them ?
I thought it was a popular resolution as well. Place a counter in your site and check to see which % uses XXXX resolution. Then you can figure out what size the majority of your users use. (I use: http://www.statcounter.com )
hi iatbm, just sharing my opinion. cause i think if you dont support it anymore then those users will be force to change their resolution and im just thinking 800X600 is such an ugly resolution. everything is too big.
only 3.95% of visitors to my main website have 800*600 so I don't give a damn... its a dead resolution.
sandrodz, as I mentioned above, I too have a few webmaster related websites that do not fit on a 800x600 resolution, mainly because I am confident that web designers and developers use bigger screens, that appart from what stats have to confirm. On a tourism related site, I would have to adopt a different strategy, and cover lower resolutions, too.
My answer in neither.... Design for wider (1000+) widths, but make sure that the site is still viewable (with scrollbars or fluid positioning) at lower (800) widths.