Size matters

[fourmyle]

My Amazing Internet design company claim
"most people have their screens set to 800x600"
Should I believe them at face value?
Poll It's all about size...

Comments

[oldnick]

Even if some are using much higher resolution, you need to ensure that your design degrades gracefully yo the lowest resolutions used.

But yes - that figure is several years out of date.

[fourmyle]

do we?
the website is to sell designer clothes. Expensive things. We sell jeans that cost more than some computers. We sell coats that cost more than mid-range laptops. I'm not convinced that our website needs to look good for the handful of browsers who haven't been able to upgrade to a new computer some time in the last three years.

[xavin]

I guess your question should really be, "Can we do things in 1024x768 that we can't in 800x600 and that are also worth alienating that proportion of our possible audience that is still using 800x600?"

[oldnick]

Yes,

Expensive clothes buyers aren't all LJ-geeks. Don't look at your friends on here, look instead at your existing webserver logs. Find out what your customers are using, then decide how many you can afford to alienate.

I didn't say design your sites to work only at 800x600 or 640x480 - what I said was make sure that when viewed from the lower resolutions they still work adequately.

[xavin]

Of course, the population selection for a poll like this means that the results will only be anecdotal, rather than reliably representative.

However, this might be more reliable research, and would suggest that they are wrong.

[fourmyle]

... I don't know what you mean. This poll should be as accurate as a national poll. The Sun Phone-in polls for example...

However. Thanks for the link. That should be proof enough for even my web designers. (I feel that we have all learnt something)

[xavin]

Your poll is answered by the people that choose to answer it. Those people are a subset of the people who have the opportunity to answer it; i.e the people who read your LJ - essentially the people who have friended you, although it's an open post so theoretically anyone with web access could stumble across it and respond. There's probably not enough of those (very likely zero, in fact) to influence the outcome though.

Assuming there's no bias in those who choose to respond vs those who don't (by no means a given, although I'd guess it's likely to be a fair assumption here), then your poll is representative of those who had the chance to answer it. It does not follow that it's representative of the population as a whole, nor of the people who will be using your company's website. In fact, it's quite unlikely that your friends list is representative of either of those two groups

[fourmyle]

i was being sarcastic. sorry. I promise never to do it again.

[fourmyle]

well, I noticed that the current messenger has a minimum requirement of 1024x768...

Which has implications.

[dantarian]

I view the web at one of:

1280x1024
1280x800
2048x1280
240x320

... depending on which device I'm using at the time.

800x600 is a reasonable minimum to work to, though, as it's pretty unlikely that people will be using less than that (he says, reading LJ on his phone...).

[fourmyle]

one of the issues is how small a website restricted to 800 wide looks on (for example) my 1280x1024... if it is too small, the site looks worse for it.

[dantarian]

Generally the workaround is to have an auto-resizing main pane, and variable-width borders. So a small screen will have no borders and a main pane that fills all available space, and a larger one will have some borders but also a larger main pane. Gives you a nice balance, that way.

[sack_boy]

1280 x 1024 here at work, 1280 x whatever it is widescreen at home