Screen size

I'm surprised nobody is talking about demographics here.

I think that some of the statistics offered by people in this thread are great, but they aren't qualified numbers.

In other words, the thread starter's site is re: Jupiter, Florida. As I know it, Florida is where you go to retire, and Jupiter is a nice place to do that. I don't know a lot of old people, but the ones I do know tend to all have their monitors set at 800x600.

So I think the most pertinent advice is to know your audience when making this decision, and then build your site to accommodate res just to either side of that.

 

Why make things more complicated than they have to be?

800x600 is a very qualified number. If XP ships with 800x600 as the minimum desktop size, as it has been since the end of 2001, then seeing, for instance, 25% of viewers, regardless of where they may actually physically come from, as having 800x600 screen res means that you cannot ignore them or relegate them because you're more 1024, 1152 or 1280, so just work with them

Everyone else with higher res should be able to see the site OK... if not, for the big res, then the site should have accessibility issues factored in such as being able to up the text size so that it is at least usable if not 100% pretty

 

My banking site requires me to scroll to the right even at 1024px :0 I can't believe such ignorance really. Not to mention that some functions don't work in anything other than IE. Great idea, encourage all your users to use a really insecure browser for their banking

 

Thanks for all the feedback.

I have been trying to always test my sites to confirm that they look and function well at 800X600. I had heard some feedback that I shoudl consider optimizing my site higher, based on the feedback here - it supports my own conclusions.

Dave

 

I designed today my website for both 800x600 and 1024x768... by placing some extra elements outside the 800x600 visitor's range view, yet without harming the overall design. See it here: www.astrologyweekly.com
About 30% of my visitors still have 800x600 screens.

 

Great thread, on a topic that doesn't seem to get a lot of coverage

I am just starting to get to grips with CSS, so forgive me if I have this all wrong; but, re fluid design and min-width, per here and here, the min-width property has no IE support (i.e., its not just a question of not being supported in some browsers, but rather it is not yet supported in the by far the most used browser). So the limiting facor would seem to be not resolution, but the browser type your visitors use most often.

Would the best compromise be relative (%) based div widths, without the min-width restriction, that work at least fairly well in 800x600, but look best in the most popular resolution?

 

I was surprised to see in my stats that roughly 30% of my visitors have 800x600 resolutions. I think if you targetted a tech site you might see this number drop off significantly, but there is a huge market of dial-in users with small screens out there who make up a large part of the consumer segment.

I'm surprised that more sites out there do not have either fluid layouts or designs for 800x600 screens. AOL, MSN, earthlink, etc. are all still doing good business and even in southern cal where the tech market is pretty strong there are a ton of guys making money selling bargain priced old computers and monitors out of their garage to people who otherwise would never buy one.

 

I design for 800x600 and 1024x768. Everything looks fine at 800x600, just a tad big. I tried to work with 640x480 but that was simply too hard.

 

I use 8x6 and then move out. Weekends are hot for the 8x6 crowd.

 

One other thing to consider when designing for a certain size is that not everybody surfs the web with their windows maximized. If you consider that another 10-20% of your users who have 1024x768 screens will have their screens resized to 800x600 or smaller, then it really pushes you towards the decision of designing for a smaller screen.

 

width: 780px;

 

My 2 cents.

Most of the traffic I notice is during normal business hours. This suggests that many people surf at work(Oh My Say It Isn't So). Well from my last contract with a large TelCo I noticed many many people were still using win95 and win98 OS's with almost all but managers could only use 800x600 resolutions. So I had to evaluate, can a site that is designed specificly 800x easily viewable by higher resolutions(policy no horizontal scrolling)? Can a site designed specificly for 1024x easily viewable by 800x(once again no horizontal scrolling)?

These are my policies, so each person's market is different, but as a result I first build a site around 800x screen sizes, and if I really want to enhance the site for larger resolutions, check for it, and drive a person to different set of pages.

my two cents, do I get change back?

tom

 

Excellent thread all. Definitely a topic I rarely think about, but could have a huge potential impact.

You had mentioned side bars taking a little space away, but what about toolbars? Google, Yahoo, etc... How much do you compensate the height variable for those?

 

Does anyone know of a site that lets you view a screen grab of what your website looks like on say 1074x768. Similar to the screen grab alexa.com shows.

I have found some sites that display an example of what your site looks like in different screen sizes but they don't give an accurate representation if you are using a 800x600 screen in the first place.

Screen Size Tester Sites

http://www.anybrowser.com/ScreenSizeTest.html

and

http://www.gdezigns.com/TestResolution.cfm

 

Very good point. I never have a window full screen on either of my dual monitors. I usually design for 800x600 as well. Last think I want to do is turn people away for a simple thing like that.

 

I usually go 775 x ___

To leave room for browser and scroll bar.

 

800x600 is what I have often found for many non-business users at home.

 

I have never heard of users with 1024x768 or higher screen size that still keep 800x600 browser window. Isn't that just soo annoying that you see your desktop or whatever when browsing the internet