Comments on: Designing for 800×600?

By: Sam Hall

Sam Hall — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:51:59 +0000

For a technology blog, I’d aim for smart phone friendly templates (mine took me about 2 hours to set up and reads well now in all resolutions).

For applications, well that’s up to you and your clients to negotiate. I personally always go for 1024×768 as a minimum these days. 800×600 hasn’t been demanded of me for years now. More and more requests for smart phone support keep coming my way recently though.

As you’re no doubt well aware, the standard APEX templates are a nightmare for web designers, this is the real issue. A good template should render nicely in any resolution.

If I had the time I’d make an iPhone friendly template for APEX. For now, I generally just ask what functionality is most useful to have access to from a phone and duplicate a very small subset of the features of the system on a few iPhone specific pages.

By: John Scott

John Scott — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:24:26 +0000

Just to clarify…I’m not saying that you should make sites that don’t work in 800×600. I was trying to say that you should not design your site to ‘look best’ at 800×600 or use 800×600 as your baseline.

John.

By: Niall Litchfield

Niall Litchfield — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:26:39 +0000

The logic still likely applies to Amazon, but it’s 3.5% not 5% as per http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=17 which is a leading source of market share information and certainly not developer related. Fuel for the fire though, 1680×1050 is a higher share of the audience and I bet the folk asking for 800×600 view it as a niche.

By: John Scott

John Scott — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:04:56 +0000

Hi Paulo,

Sure, that’s why I included the line -

“Now there are a few cases where this definitely is a real requirement”.

John.

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:19:41 +0000

Hi.

I agree. It very much depends on your business and target.

If you are Amazon, losing 5% of the market represents a massive loss, so you decision process will be different than someone building for their company intranet.

I know lots of people that still build IE only sites because they know they have a captive audience. :)

I think we should make web pages that fail if you are on anything but the latest browser. :)

Cheers

Tim…

By: Paulo Vale

Paulo Vale — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:43:50 +0000

Hi John,

You must not forget the audience type. Your blog is almost for sure visited mainly by developers, that supposedly have better hardware resources than the rest of the population.

I guess it all depends on the target of the application you’re developing. I give you an example. We have at Neoface an Internet ERP solution that is supposed to work with small POS screens.

But if we are talking about traditional web applications/websites, you’re absolutely right… a bigger war is to get rid of ie6 :)