I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard people say “The site must be designed to work in 800×600 resolution”. Now there are a few cases where this definitely is a real requirement, however often it’s more of a case that people don’t want to potentially exclude people from their site (and if it’s a commercial site why wouldn’t you want to appeal to the widest possible audience?).
However, how many people really use an 800×600 resolution these days? Out of interest I took a look at the statistics from my blog (the one you’re reading right now) for yesterday (I posted a new post yesterday so it would be interesting to see the stats for the new views just for yesterday rather than over the entire lifetime of the site).
So, whilst I’m not trying to pretend that these figures are representative of any other sites out there. They highlight a couple of things to me.
1) Nobody visited my site using 800×600 resolution.
2) The smallest resolution was 320×396 (probably an iPhone or other mobile device). After that the next smallest was 1024×768.
3) There are quite a lot of variations in browser resolution, more than I expected really.
So, what’s my point here? Well…I don’t really have one….other than -
1) Needing to support 800×600 is very different to designing the site in 800×600. In other words it’s no bad thing to have your site gracefully degrade to working nicely in 800×600, but I certainly wouldn’t make the starting design 800×600, otherwise you’d spending effort where there seems to be least reward.
2) 1024×768 is now becoming over-shadowed by higher resolutions. Most laptops these days support higher resolutions than that, let alone desktops. Most developers I know have multiple monitors too.
So, don’t be afraid of challenging the requirement of “We must design for 800×600″…how many people are *really* using it? Let’s stamp it out now…
