Menu

• Dictionary
• Hot Shots

Directory

• Sponsors
• Billing Options
• Content Providers
• Web Hosting
• Traffic Counters
• Website Designers
• Resource Sites

Ok so it's Monday and a very pleasant weekend is over and done with. I suppose I could have said that the weekend is done and dusted but in the last five days we've gone through two big dust storms and there's still enough dust around in the atmosphere to make dusting a complete waste of time.

Steve cleaned and dusted after the first one and now he's not going to rush in and do too much cleaning till the dust haze from the second one has gone completely.

Today, because it's the last column for this month I thought I'd look at some stats about screen resolutions just to see what people are using to view our websites these days. Years ago the best test to discover what screen resolutions people were using was simply to walk into the computer section of a department store and see what the resolutions were on the monitors that were on display. Back then ... and even today ... most people don't change the screen resolution when they bring a new monitor/computer home from the store so the department store survey was a good test to see what the most popular resolution was.

Today most analytics programs will save you that trip to the department store because they'll give you a clear indication of what are the most popular resolutions for people who are visiting your site. So I grabbed the Google Analytics data for one of Steve's very popular mainstream sites ... one that appeals to mostly non-geeks ... and went to check the resolutions. By accident I clicked on the browser link first and got quite a surprise but more of that in just a moment ... first let's look at resolutions.

Screen resolutions
These days with the variety of wide screen monitors that's available on the market today you can end up with a huge number of different resolutions turning up in the stats and one webmaster's stats that I saw the other day suggested that a couple of variations on 1280 were what most people were using to view his site.

But sometimes you need to look beyond the what's working for other webmasters and think about the people who are actually visiting your sites. The site I mentioned in the last paragraph attracts a lot of webmasters and marketers while the site of Steve's that I was looking at attracts mostly ordinary people ... possibly males who probably visit that site alone.

There's nothing adult about that site at all, it just happens to deal with a subject that usually interests men far more than women and visitors come to the site from all over the world. On that site the most popular resolution last month was still 1024x768.

1280x800 was the second most popular resolution and the once popular 800x600 screen resolution was well down in position 10.

Just for fun I compared those stats to the stats last month for another one of Steve's popular mainstream sites. This one deals with a totally different subject and one that probably attracts visitors from a slightly higher socio-economic background than the first site I mentioned and probably interests couples more than singles or individuals. Most of these visitors come from Australia with a few wandering in from the United Kingdom and Europe. On that second site the statistics for screen resolutions was almost the same but 800x600 had risen to position 6.

The screen resolution of 320x396 is a very interesting one and you really should be looking for it in your stats. Why is that one so interesting? That screen resolution is the one used by the iPhone. On Steve's first site just under 4 per cent of visitors were using that resolution and that put it at number six on the resolution list of 185 different resolutions.

On Steve's second site ... the one that probably interested couples ... there were 70 different screen resolutions used to view the site in the last month and just under 0.5 per cent looked at the site via their iPhones. That was only enough to put it way down at number 18.

So what screen resolutions are you currently designing for?

Browsers As I said at the beginning, I accidentally clicked on the browser link in Analytics and got quite a surprise. In Steve's first site Firefox accounted for slightly over 50 per cent of all the browsers used by the people who visited the site. 27.5 per cent of people used Internet Explorer (and 25 per cent of those used IE6) and Chrome, Safari, Opera, BlackBerry and Playstation 3 made up the rest.

On Steve's second site ... the site that attracts more local interest ... the browser figures were quite different. On that site Internet Explorer absolutely blitzed the field with 68.38 per cent of the visitors (IE6 accounted for 14 per cent of the visitors who used Internet Explorer) with 22 per cent of visitors using Firefox and the rest using Chrome, Safari, Mozilla, Opera, BlackBerry and Playstation 3.

So how do those figures match up with your stats and what do they tell you about the people who are visiting your site?