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109 Comments
- MVanNostrin, on 10/12/2007, -1/+54Elastic layouts are really the way to go. Locking your design into a single resolution
(even if it is the most common) just isn't very user-centric. Better to design for the most common case and allow the design to gracefully degrade or stretch as necessary. Jacob Nielsen recently had a nice write up on this topic: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/screen_resolution.html - quasipalm, on 10/12/2007, -1/+24Exactly -- besides, I rarely have my browser maximized. I usually have it somewhere bigger than 800x600, but smaller than 1024.
- foolfromhell, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16my grandpa does. he cant read small text. his monitor can do 1600x1200. hes still on 800x600. it burns my eyes though
- EtherGnat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14If you absolutely HAVE to design a fixed width site design it to fit 800x600 or less. Most sites go wide for no purpose other than to add more clutter and make their sites harder to read. It also plays havoc when I open more than one windows side-by-side. The whole reason I bought a big widescreen monitor was to run multiple applications so please stop hijaacking my space. We won't even talk about how unpleasant browsing your wide layout page is on my phone.
With a little clever design a liquid layout page will look better at ALL resolutions. - heptahedron, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14Please don't do this. It's presumptuous to assume that everyone wants 1024-wide windows even if their monitor can handle it. Personally, I like a window width of of about 600 pix (800 is not so bad) so that I can have multiple windows open side by side on a 1920 x 1200 monitor. Even though 1024 is no problem for me, I hate sites that want to consume so much screen real estate.
Filling the screen is selfish. Let the user decide, not the designer! - ApeInago, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1480x25 ftw
- timealterer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11As a matter of fact, I know a lot of people who use about 800px or 900px as the width of their browser even though they have a higher display resolution. The lesson: do not mistake statistics of what screen resolutions have for statistics of what browser sizes people use!
- n00bst3r, on 10/12/2007, -8/+19People still use 800x600?
- prockcore, on 10/12/2007, -6/+16Who cares what resolution my screen is at, who uses their browser full screen?
- carguy84, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Nah, I have it correct.
I prefer thinner columns of text in any case. It makes speed reading(scanning) a lot easier. My eyes can take in a whole block of text grouped together and pull out the important stuff a lot faster. If my eyes have to scroll left to right 1200 pixels, I'm going to get fatigued pretty fast. That's why a good bulleted list near the top of every article is also very effective.
Chip- - thehumangame, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9OK time for a newsflash here.
Your website is not the only thing I am looking at.
Your website is not so important that it deserves to obscure the other windows I have open with its width.
It is presumptuous to think that, just because a user has a display with 1024 or 1280 horizontal pixels, that you get to have all of them.
There are ways to gather statistics on the user's actual window width instead of irrelevant information like screen resolution. These ways should be used. - Urusai, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11Most users are using IE, so why bother using standards-compliant HTML?
That's the kind of reasoning I'm seeing here. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Update: My bad, digg.com is not elastic.
using the fluid stylesheet from userstyles makes it fluid. and it scales to about 500px and i even had the website screenshot add on for digg going.. so it scales well.
http://img147.imageshack.us/img147/7564/image1dp1.jpg
thats what it looks like if you want to see what i am talking about without trying it. - charged2885, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7i really dislike the idea of designing for a specific resolution. i rarely browse with maximized browser windows. my windows are rarely wider than 800 pixels. as long as the important content is viewable without having to horizontally scroll, i'm happy (like digg for example. the ads are the only thing cropped in this window)
- firefox15, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Any good elastic website also has a "max-width" set to prevent this sort of thing (text too long).
- retsoced, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7According to the W3C ( http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp ), 58% of users have a screen resolution of 1024 x 768. This is almost to the exact percentage what any of our 5 plus sites see on a daily basis. That's a great statistic, and I would love to be able to design to that size exclusively. It's just not high enough. Period.
As stated you design to your users, and until 90% or higher get to the higher screen resolutions , it doesn't make sense. What's more, there are still a lot of execs and high level managers within the company viewing at 800 x 600, so to them the site would be too big, and therefore be broken and/or not right.
People like to throw out these figures like standardistas touting CSS, tableless, standards oriented design - stating that it has to be this way, if you don't do it this way, you're not a professional. It's an easy target, just like saying Flash is 99% bad, or plopping AJAX and Web 2.0 in the title of a Digg post. There's no definitively right way to build a website - but there is a wrong way. Alienating you users is just that.
There's nothing new in this article, just lots of shoulds, coulds, and woulds. No kidding it's inevitable that screen sizes will increase. Unfortunately what is not inevitable is that "designers" who consider only technology, and what they want will never see the light about usability. - foobarra, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9More out of their computer? I think you mean they will have to buy new ones so graphics resolution snobs like yourself don't cringe and tell them they need to upgrade... You are typifying the HW/OS cycle - build a new bloated OS that makes your existing (perfectly working) hardware obsolete, and require the new OS to run any recent software (which you *must* have, right?), which in turn means you need to buy a new box...
- xxNIRVANAxx, on 10/12/2007, -4/+10unfortunately
- daofma, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Except that some of us with higher screen resolutions don't browse at max resolution. I keep my browser window at just the amount I have to to display digg and slashdot and such. No wider, because that's a waste of my screen space, where I have to make room for things like a triple wide start menu so I can see the date, AIM, etc.
- lrgabriel, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Great--now we'll have 1024x768 pages, with only 800x600 px of content and the rest all ads...
- adolfojp, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Elastic widths are good up to certain width.
That is why newspaper articles come in columns. If the text area is too wide then the text becomes very difficult to read. With my wide screen display I find myself resizing the browser down to make the elastic websites easier to read. - drakethegreat, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Yes I agree, porn companies have been taking advantage of LCD screens default resolutions for some time now. I have to say I have no complaints.
- tempusrob, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5My website only gets 3% of its visitors at 800x600, but last I looked at w3schools.com, something like 15% were still using it. Not ignorable yet, considering people were clamouring when Firefox hit double-digit market share. ;)
Anyway, at the end of the day you need to design for your target audience first and foremost, and that includes considering things like screen resolution. Just think about who you want to engage. Bleeding-edge users (geeks, gamers, etc...) are going to have higher screen resolutions. Old people won't. - grubesteak, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Ultimately, there is no one resolution one should design for, but rather, you should design for your users.
My company has 13 different domains under its umbrella. I was really wanting to find out more information about the screen resolutions used by our viewers, so I headed on over to Google Analytics and started using it for all those great details.
Overwhelmingly, across our 13 domains, users have 1024 X 768 resolutions (by about 60 percent, on the average). We're currently in plans to move away from our 800 X 600 design and bump it up.
If you're serious about designing, use Google Analytics and design to meet your viewers needs are, not what someone tells you everyone is using. You might just find that all your users having 800 X 600. Designing for anything bigger would be a waste. - carguy84, on 10/12/2007, -5/+10It really depends on the content, niche and layout of the site. A blanket "liquid layout is the best answer", isn't going to pass. What if the content of my site is travel, and is very text heavy. Say I rely on ads interspersed with my content, I want those ads to be in the same spot no matter if the user's resolution is 800px wide or 2560px.
I think it's safe to design for 1024, depending on your niche. A site like this would be no problem as it is a bunch of techs who probably don't surf at anything less than 1280.
My person preference is to do layouts at 900px. This way some one with 1024 can surf with their favorites open, and still not scroll.
Chip- - MalDON, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Problem is, we now have devices, such as those pocket sized laptops they got at frys, that use a very small screen resolution. I personally am sticking to a fluid design.
- jayswain, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7If you're creating a website, you should be designing for your target audience/market.
You should create the document according to what environment you think that they (the user) are going to be running.
Digg.com .... could probably be @ 1024x768
MealsonWheels.com ... should probably be designed @ 800 x 600 - agarc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5In most cases I'm finding it appropriate to design for larger resolutions. However, I'm not a fan of every website switching to larger sizes. When 17" monitors were considered "large", it was wonderful to upgrade in size and be able to have your web browser open along with a bunch of other apps all tiled on the screen. Now it seems like everybody (obviously I'm generalizing) is upping the font sizes and design widths to accommodate our 24" widescreen displays. Sure, the readability seems better, but all of my desktop space is gone again! Fonts keep getting larger and larger (look at Comcast.com)! ;)
I have a much greater appreciation for the well-designed site that is easy to use, has readable font sizes, "Web 2.0"-ish design techniques and occupies 700px in width or less. This combination is very hard to find! - leobaby, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7thank god opera and ie7 both have page scaling, I'm getting sick of little web pages (like digg)....
- NightRush, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7
http://www.duggmirror.com/design/Design_Optimal_width_for_1024px_resolution/ - xamox, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Yeah with stylesheets sizing shouldn't be an issue.
According to google analytics the people who visit my site breaksdown like this:
800x600 - 8%
1024x768 - 36%
1280x1024 - 23%
1600x1200 - 4%
all other resolutions make the rest. - vbsurfer, on 10/12/2007, -10/+14This is lame. Most designers are using 1024 for some time now. Since LCD displays, most people are running 1280 x 1024 anyways.
- thehumangame, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Ever tried actually reading a website with multiple columns of main content? It doesn't work on a screen the way it works in a newspaper, because newspapers don't have vertical scrollbars. To get back up to the top and start reading the next column, you just move your eyes. On a screen, it's a pain.
(Incidentally, there's an even worse case: the dreaded multicolumn PDF.) - darkdriving, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6I think what he's trying to say is that he hopes the out-of-the-box resolution of Vista is 1024x768 versus 800x600, and it is in that way that people can be a little more productive with their screen real estate.
- DigeratiPrime, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3well i think the gui in vista is supposed to adjust to different DPI settings correctly. 96 DPI is pretty much forced on the user currently on all OS's and thus some people have to use 800x600 to be able to read text. With proper DIP support you can set your grannies pc on 1024x768 with 120 DPI or higher and everything will be just as large but at much better resolution for example.
- r3zonance, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Best thing you can do really, is set the body tags font-size to 67.5% (makes it around 10pt at "Normal" size setting) and then for all other measurements (except maybe borders and image sizes) use "em" units. With 1em (using the above body font-size) being 10pt, and 1.6em being 16pt.
If you design it right then it will look good and any resolution. - MioTheGreat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I find that it's easier to make a layout expand than it is to make a layout shrink. With most designs, you HAVE to set a minimum.
- Burmask, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Great, practical advise and I agree with you 100%. Plus, centered, fixed width pages waste too much, above the fold, space on either side.
- Picard102, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Design for your users, not your prejudices.
- omaryak, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I have a 1024 x 768 monitor, so I still browse at 800 x 600. :( As soon as I can get a MacBook, I will make the move to 1024px. But I do wish that those who designed their sites for 1024px would offer an 800px option, such as Yahoo! currently does for its updated home page.
- doubledoh, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Uh, no. Are we forgetting mobile devices?
Websites need to be developed with multiple style sheets for multiple resolutions, including mobile devices that have half the resolution as regular monitors. - whiteyMcBrown, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2As a web designer, I think a lot of people here are kinda misguided when they use the stats of web usage. I mean, it's all about your target audience. When I design things for techies, then I can feel free to use a higher resolution. Older women play a surprising amount of branded online games, and very often have their resolutions set not as high (shockwave.com knows this). Often, you don't want to design for the largest mass of people, but for the lowest common denominator. A company may prefer that everyone is able to fully view the site, rather than excluding the few that don't have their resolutions set that high. My mom does internet banking and listens to online radio and reads the news and she finds it much easier to do so at 800x600... most people I've seen, over 50 yrs old, do.
- JesseJ, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Ever thought about why paperback pocketbooks are that size? I bet they could make huge sheets of paper, but it is is not nice to read a wide page... same goes for web page width.
The human eye should not jump more than 3 times per row, or you get eye-fatigue. That is a truth also behind successful websites (Yes there are exceptions). The contrast of a screen is also higher than that on paper, so it is even more strain on the eye to read a screen than paper. So making a wider web page is not something I would strive for as a web designer.
I would rather see a higher dpi than wider dpi (a screen with the same width in inches but more pixels per inch, aka 'smaller dots') but as it looks now, the as many inches as possible is what people supposedly want right now... that's what is being sold... big screens with huge bulky Lego dots for pixels. - ThankTheCheese, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Agree 100%. I was about to post the same thing. Just because someone has 1024+ res available to them, does not mean they will use it all. In my personal experience, I find that the more real estate I have, the smaller my windows get, because I want to cram more in.
- joeydoo, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5So in 2007 we are going to "default browser window can display" 1024x768?
I can see the reasoning behind this, as not everyone with 1280x1024 for instance would want to have ALL their screen full. Or be requiring to use a maxed window.
The thing that gets me is that there has been little choice. Ars Technica (Others too, I can't remember who) has had a user selection for widening the page for a long time.
Why hasn't that option been implemented by more websites? - Timbit42, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Why do browsers report OS screen size instead of the browser window size?
I think reporting on browser window size would be more enlightening and useful to web designers.
I wonder what would happen to the statistics if browsers started returning browser window size instead of OS screen size? - madsmith, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Making the windows larger implies that either
a) more text will appear per line, flattening out paragraphs and negatively affecting reading performance
b) the site increases the default font size (which in turn implies that the user should be sitting further away from there monitor for a comfortable view).
If we accept that the human eye's field of view is fixed and that there's little variance in the average distance between the user's eye and the screen, then we can infer that we will also have an optimal width of the medium. I suspect that this would be just around 800px as 1024 just seems to wide to comfortably read a paragraph of text.
I think that the wider screens (like my Dell 24FPW) are best served for 'parallelizing' content to the user (more windows) and not giving a single piece of content additional space (bigger sizes).
Addendum: one benificial use to a wider presentation is that it allows you room for tangential content such as advertising and navigation, which is not part of the focus of the viewers attention. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3mobile access to the web is the ne growth area, only an idiot would ignore that.
- cptpike, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6Jacob Neilsen wrote:
"Big monitors are the easiest way to increase white-collar productivity, and anyone who makes at least $50,000 per year ought to have at least 1600x1200 screen resolution."
I make more than that but, my eyes are bad. I can kinda see what he's getting at but, that statement is bit ridiculous. -
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