I got a bit ahead of myself last week, and already posted on Krug’s book last week. Feedback is still appreciated on that post if anyone has new thoughts since reading the book.
I just started writing a comment on Rwany’s post, but it was growing lengthy and I decided to break it out here. He mentions screen resolutions. I’ve been meaning to post on this topic for a couple of weeks now. I think our print sources are way out of date on that topic. I think even 960 is cutting it a bit slim and wasting some page space, frankly. Here are some recent stats from one source on screen resolutions. As they mention, these stats might be a bit skewed towards people with a higher degree of technical competence, but you can see that as of January, 96% of their users were running at least 1024×768, and 76% were running even higher than that. Here’s a good article on the topic, showing the continuing decrease of 800×600 users. I have some experience with this matter on another website that I’m running, and a quick check on visitor statistics there shows that 96% are running at 1024 or higher.
I think this all comes down to choice…do you want to make a narrower page that caters to the lowest common denominator, or something wider that will be more appealing to the vast majority of users? I do have a specific concern about this matter for this course, in that I think the resolution on the projector we’re reviewing our sites on in the computer lab is running something lower than 1024. This would explain why my site looked a little squished, and perhaps why Dan’s photos on his original layout were mysteriously wrapping. I think my site width is around 950 right now, and I noticed there was barely any border when it was up on the screen 2 weeks ago. I had a question about that in class last week but I don’t think I voiced my concern properly.
I’m glad you brought this up. I feel like 800×600 is antiquated as well, but so far, I’ve kept my portfolio page and image assignment within that width. If the statistics on the page you cite are accurate, and only 1% of web users have such a small resolution, there really doesn’t seem to be much of a point of keeping my future sites within that tight window.
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Dave, I agree that keeping sites to 740 px for 800×600 monitors is a bit silly and outdated. But what I would say is that I would keep your text elements, i.e. your primary content div, etc., to about that width. Even though monitor sizes have move up, we still don’t feel comfortable reading really long lines of text. I looks like you’ve done that on your site, and that’s a compromise I’m making on mine too.
That’s a great point Dan, thanks for clarifying that. I’m trying to keep my text fairly narrow, but I want my overall page space to be a bit wider, as I think most monitors these days are running at least at 1024. Netbooks could be a constraint going forward, but I know that I run my desktop monitor at 1680, so I’ve got a lot of wasted space on my webpage here at home.