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Today's Average Screen Resolution?
ShadowDawn asks: "I'm looking to develop a website for average computer illiterate users and I'm just curious what the average users screen resolution is, now a days? I know 800x600 used to be the main size to develop for, but last I had seen 1024x768 was taking over. I was just wondering if anyone out there ran a 'normal' site that 'normal' people visit and would have some insight."
The funny thing is, resolution shouldn't matter much anymore. If you switch to a higher resolution, things shouldn't suddenly look a lot smaller, they should look sharper!
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
We have about 50% at 1024x768 and about 20% at 800x600. The rest is a wide mix with the common ones being 1280x1024 and 640x480.
Please don't force me to maximize my browser window just to noodle around your site(s). Do your HTML/CSS so that your web pages adjust with the size of the browser window. Please don't hard code table sizes in pixels and other such idiocies.
Why not just try to make the site work on a wide range of resolutions, as that way you will not be alienating that many people. It is not impossible to make a website that will stretch to large resolutions, and shrink to fit the smaller ones.
Personally I think 1024x768 and 1280x1024 are the two important ones to make sure the site works properly at, as 1024x768 seems to be very popular, however 1280x1024 is the native resolution of a large number of TFT screens.
Some of your users will have huge 1600x1200 LCDs. Others will be running old hand-me-down 640x480 VGA monitors, or nice monitors with that stupid default resolution of Win95/98.
/any/ attention to "resolution".
But it doesn't matter. What you do is design your site in standards-compliant XHTML, using CSS for formatting (not tables), and let the user's browser render it however is best for that particular platform.
Web designers (and I am one) should not be paying
--
Twoflower
Don't design for a resolution, thats just as bad as designing for ie. Make a webpage, *TEST IT* in 800x600, 1024x768, 1600x1200, whatever, but don't design it for something. It should work fine in all resolutions, not having half the page wasted on blank space, or text overlapping, or any other problem that comes from bad web developers saying "thats okay, it works in what I designed it for"
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Stop.
Please.
You are the bane of the web browser.
Sites should be usable and viewable with any resolution with any web browser.
We do not want an art exhibit, we want a web page. With stuff on it. Knowledge.
I for example, frequently browse at 320 pixels across. I don't visit sites that don't work at that resolution. My employer uses his Treo frequently and has even worse to say on that.
But my resolution? Well above 2000 pixels across.
See, just because some web browsers (the users, not the programs) browse at full screen doesn't mean everyone does it.
Web pages are not canvases- they do not have a size, and by artificially attempting to create one, you are doing the web a disservice.
On the other hand, by treating them as such, chances are you have so little to say that it isn't useful at all in which case myself, and other web browsers simply won't visit your site.
You will of course think it has something to do with the modernness of your design and make it even less usable.
The cycle will continue.
And nobody will notice.
Why do you want to know the screen resolution? That isn't going to tell you what the viewport size is. Non-maximised browsers, browsers with sidebars open, larger than default scrollbars... there's huge amounts of ways in which the viewport size can differ from the screen resolution.
More importantly though, it sounds like you are trying to design a website with a fixed width. That's not necessary. Use percentages, and your layout will expand and contract to fit a wide range of viewports, without leaving an ugly and wasteful gap down the side in larger viewports and without forcing horizontal scrolling for smaller viewports.
I'd like to pre-empt the people complaining that longer line-lengths are harder to read by pointing out that there's evidence to suggest that those studies, while perfectly fine for print, don't apply to computer displays, and in any case can be mitigated by using max-width in ems on <p> elements in a user or author stylesheet.
I'd also like to pre-empt the people who say "but average users don't change the defaults!" by pointing out that, if true, would mean that the average user would be using a non-maximised browser window, as per Internet Explorer and Safari defaults.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I see a lot of "if you're a good web designer, you won't care about resolution, and you'll be smart enough to make your sites resolution-independent" kind of comments in this mix here. Yeah, there's something to that. The web isn't the same as the printed page, after all.
But you'll notice that many--not most, but I'd honestly say the majority--of professionally-designed web sites that are text-heavy do use a fixed width for text blocks. Despite what some people here seem to think, sites that do that are not designed by ignorant graphic designers too stupid to use good design principles. They're designed by graphic designers smart enough to know that "the web isn't the same as the printed page" doesn't mean that everything we've learned in centuries of typography and layout is merrily tossed out.
One of the basic rules of typography is that line length affects readability. You can play around with the length for various effects, but a block of text that's wider than about 39 ems and longer than a paragraph or two is going to be harder to read. This still applies on the screen.
There's an implicit attitude among a lot of hardcore tech types that graphic design doesn't involve actual work -- we're just sitting around stapling Dreamweaver templates over your glorious PHP, and that any design decisions we make that aren't The Way Engineers Would Do It are proof that we're clueless. I'm sorry you guys resent any use of the web that couldn't have been done in HTML 2.0, but it's time to take your hands off the VAX keyboard and back away slowly.
I agree that when you're designing a web page, you shouldn't be thinking too much about the user's screen resolution, but the reality is that I'm probably not going to be designing my page so it will fill up your 2048x1536 display; I'm going to be designing my page so it's going to be readable on your 2048x1536 display. And that may just mean designing for a specific width. Get over it.