“The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops, but the kind of man that the country turns out.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
I love new technology. We all do on the web team, and we alike many other web design teams grapple with the classic ‘catch 22’ of web design: how to support as many new technologies, while keeping your content accessible to everyone regardless of the type or age of the computer they have?
(Wondering what screen resolution is? Wikipedia has a solid introduction)
Monitor technology has come a long way from when I first started developing websites in the 1990s. Most people’s screen resolutions were 640 x 480, which limited the amount of design real estate you had available. Slowly, but surely, technology advanced and by the turn of the new millennium the web design community was noticing that the number of users using 640 x 480 was dropping down to critically low numbers. Slowly, web designers began to drop support for the older resolutions and wider more robust designs became the norm.
Back to the Present
Just nine years later, web designers are again having a similar discussion, but this time about 800 x 600. Can we design a larger site for larger resolutions? To find out, we went to the numbers, and there were a few surprises.
An ongoing test of the Buffalo State Gallery has revealed that only 2.17% of users were using our website with a screen resolution of 800 x 600. Nearly 98% of our users had resolutions of 1024 x 768 or greater (view numbers here). Others have found similar results when surveying their own websites. The wider monitors mean more space to deliver content, which allows us to make the design more readable and more usable.
But what about that 2.17%?!
We haven’t forgotten. As I said above, we strive to keep our content accessible to all people regardless of their browser size. Therefore, we need a plan if we want to design a site wider than 800 pixels, and for inspiration we sometimes have to look in unusual places (maybe some may find this surprising, but I’m a huge fan of hockey, so this is an example I see every day). ESPN.com has a great example of design for resolutions greater than 800 pixels wide, while still providing all the primary content within the first 700 pixels.
Espn.com viewed on an 800 x 600 resolution monitor
Espn.com viewed on a 1024 x 768 or higher resolution monitor
All of the content to the right of the “horizontal fold” for users on 800 x 600 is extra content. The top news stories, navigation, and features are all safely to the left of the page, so that if you don’t have a larger monitor- you don’t miss anything.
And now on to the future…
So with this knowledge in hand, and positive examples from other major websites including CNN, CBS, Amazon.com, MSN, Yahoo, and other colleges like Carnegie-Melon and UNL, we here on the web team feel that it’s time to design a wider site to support the larger monitor resolutions that our users are using. Onward! As we continue to embrace technology while supporting all of our users!
Subscribe to this feed
