Screen Resolutions and Stuff
Posted On: 2008-09-25
Ok so it's Thursday and I'm still wondering where the last few days have gone. It only seems like yesterday that I sat down to write Monday's column and now we're over hump day and the weekend is just ahead. Here we've been promised some really warm weather now that Spring has officially begun and there could be a chance of some jet skiing time on Sunday ... let's hope so.
On the drive back from coffee this morning I began thinking about a new site we're building for a client and the discussion with Steve turned to browser resolutions. It doesn't seem all that long ago that 800x600 was the default size that we should be working with if we wanted to appeal to the biggest cross-section of surfers.
No surfer likes to scroll sideways to see all of a web page so even after systems began to ship with a default setting of 1024x768 it was still advisable to design for the smaller resolution just to keep everyone happy. But that was a few years ago now so I decided to check the stats for some of our high-traffic sites just to see what resolutions most people were using these days.
One of our mainstream sites sees thousands of page views a month from all over the planet so I logged in to the stats package we have on that site to see what it would show me. It was interesting to see some of the unusual resolutions that people were using who visited the site. There were sizes of 1920x1200, 1600x1200, 1300x1300, 1300x768, 320x240 (obviously some brave soul who was trying to see a graphically intense site on a handheld device) and a whole bunch of other odd sizes too.
But the most popular resolution was 1024x768 ... but it only accounted for slightly over 27 percent of the traffic to the site. The next most popular was 1280x800 at almost 15 percent and good old 800x600 still accounted for a bit over five percent of the visitors.
Five percent may sound like quite a small number but it actually translates into quite a few real people so I'm not sure that we've reached the time when we should be ignoring that smaller screen resolution when we're designing websites that we want to make us money.
The type of browser that people are using is also something that we should keep in mind when we design our websites. Now I know that many of us would like to forget all about IE6 ... in many ways it turned out to be as bad as one of those early Netscape browsers ... but unfortunately a lot of people out there are still using IE6.
For the mainstream site I checked IE6 still accounted for over 16.5 percent of the traffic and that's not a number we should be ignoring. IE7 accounted for 47 percent of the traffic and they were followed down the list by Firefox 3, Firefox 2 and then Safari. Opera was used by about three percent of visitors to our site.
The top platforms were interesting too. Windows XP is way out in front with an 84 percent share, Vista was next with just over 7.5 percent, Mac came third with a 3.4 percent share and then some unusual and some old platforms began to appear. Windows 98 is still being used by quite a few people, and Windows Server 2003, Suse, Debian and Ubuntu all appeared in the list of the top 12 platforms used by people who had hit our site.
While the type of platform people use isn't of much practical interest to us as webmasters the browsers and resolutions certainly are. If you're one of those who think that just because you have a widescreen monitor then everyone else must have one perhaps those resolution figures I quoted might change your mind and get you thinking about designing for a much smaller screen space.
If you do start designing for those small resolutions then you just might see your sales figures increase because, as I said early, no one likes to have scroll sideways to see all of a web page. The more scrolling someone has to do the less likely they are to stay on your site long enough to be influenced by your marketing message.
When it comes to browsers those figures are going to show you how important it is to test your site designs in all the leading browsers. Even if you're a hardcore IE user not everyone else is and what you see rendering perfectly in IE might look like total crap in Firefox. So it's important to check your designs in all those browsers just to be sure that you really are getting your marketing message across to as many people as you possibly can.
An that's it for me this week ... I'm off to get some work done so that I'll have some time to spare to hit the water this weekend.