Website Design: Resolution Issues

Especially for new webmasters, the size of your layout simply matches your computer’s resolution. However, this isn’t a good practice as is is possible that the majority of your site’s visitor’s use a different screen resolution.

When I first started, 800*600 (pixels) was the standard size for website layouts. However, the standard resolution nowadays is 1024*768, a vast improvement. Below is a chart of resolutions by percentage of users from MarketShare by NetApplications.

It is evident from this list that 1024*768 is now the most popular screen resolution and layouts should be made to its specs. The only population you may miss out on is the 800*600 population. This would cause about 6% of viewers to have to scroll to view the entirety of your website. If you really want to make a site easily viewable by everyone, you might still want to conform to the old standards of 800*600.

Note* Although not shown in the chart above, about 0.20% of screen resolutions is 320*396, the resolution for iPhones and the like. If you want to make pages for iPhone users, remember to create alternate pages that fit the 320*396 resolution.