Tim Flight

I’ve noticed a trend recently, and I’m not sure I like it. More and more sites are being designed which will not fit within the width of an 800×600 screen. Many of Apple’s new pages include graphics that are much wider than 800 pixels, and CNN redesigned their site layout in the past few days which stretches way beyond 800 pixels.

Published browser statistics from the w3schools suggest that in January of 2006 20% of their users were still using a display resolution of 800×600. That is a huge number, especially for a technical website where their visitors are more likely to have newer technology and thus higher screen resolutions.

Website statistics from my own sites are not quite that high. One website I run with mostly older-aged people shows 11% at 8×6 while a gadget site I run has 5% of people at 8×6.

I still consider 5% of visitors a sizable amount! Would you build a store that had six foot ceilings? I bet about one out of twenty (maybe more) people would have to duck while walking the aisles. That wouldn’t be good, would it?

Statistics show about 3-8% of traffic across all of my sites use a Mac. Designing sites that don’t work well on Macs wouldn’t be acceptable. Thus I’m still not giving up on 800×600 visitors either.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 31st, 2006 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Website Development. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.