Resolution
Posted By Russ Emerson on April 28, 2004 at 9:21 pm
Today I took a look at my visitor stats, which actually include a tally of the screen resolutions on the computer monitors of all my visitors. I was surprised to learn that almost 1 in 5 visitors to this site have a screen resolution of 800×600 or less.
When I view this site, it is on one of three PCs: a WindowsXP box with the monitor at 1280×1024, another XP box with the res set to 1152×864, and a Linux box with the resolution set to 1600×1200. In all cases, this site looks fine, so I usually don’t stop to think about visitors with lower screen resolutions.
For instance, in this post the graphic is 500 pixels wide. I did a quick test and changed the res on one XP machine to 800×600, and voila, the post (and indeed the whole blog) looked pretty bad. The graphic was abruptly chopped off, which somewhat invalidated the point of that post.
If you are running at 800×600 (or smaller), please leave a comment to this post. I’d like to know a) why you use that screen res, b) whether you think I should change my layout at all, and c) what changes you might like to see.
I’ll take these comments seriously, but I will not guarantee that I will actually implement any changes.
I will, however, take steps in future to make any graphics I post more user-friendly.
1280×1024 here on an 18.1 mon. Switched to 800×600 and everything got waaaaay bigger…but the header, with antenna was centered with the flags fully visible. Had to hit the square max button in the browser to get it that way BTW, but it worked.
For what it’s worth, I read the same kind of stats in re our business web sites and I get 800×600 more than 50% of the time, with 1024×768 and 640×480 splitting the rest. I’m presuming most of that is coming from other workplaces—in this case medical offices and hospitals. Is there any juice for you filtering your stats by time of day?
I don’t think I can filter on time of day, unfortunately.
Actually, I suspect the low-res percentages are higher, since Extreme Tracking counts my visits along with everyone else – and my site doubles as my homepage. Maybe not, though — it shows a very small number of views at 1600×1200, which is my preferred res. (Yep – 21″ Sony monitor.)