Page width on today's monitors?

[BrianCurtis]

Hi All,

Just doing a re-design of my site and hoping to make it all in V8 very soon but for now, just sorting design n graphics, movies and Flash etc.

What I'm interested in is what is the average browser width these days for fixed viewing on most monitors? I remember reading last year that Adobe had gone for over 1000 (or around there) but most folks browsing their site are design-based anyways so most likely have a larger/hi-res monitor.

These days, even cheapo PC's have usually 17" min. so just wondered, what dy'all think? I have new graphics for my masthead which will define the overall width as 1003pixels.

Thanks

Beej

[completerookie]

take a look at your existing stats, we still have visitors with a 600x800 screen, having said that our minimum is the 1000 version

sites selling to Gamers will be looking at better resolution monitors, after all, their selling to the games market

[RuralWeb]

Use relative sizing so it fits every size monitor

[jont]

These days, even cheapo PC's have usually 17" min. so just wondered, what dy'all think? I have new graphics for my masthead which will define the overall width as 1003pixels.

Diverging markets see small ultra-portable laptops and hand-helds with much smaller screens becoming more common place and running alongside desktop behemoths... the debate is still as lively as ever as to what size to design to.

[Mark H]

We're aiming for 1,000 on our new shop due in April, having looked at many of the web's best/most popular sites. We have always adopted the view that somebody using a 800x600 is not going to be spending money on our site, so they are not our target audience (nor are people who don't have a relatively late version of Flash)!

[RuralWeb]

flash interests me at the moment as I've noticed that it does not work on my iPhone and sites that use it for navigation are completely off limits. As jont says the mobile Market is going to soon be the biggest consideration for designers

[fergusw]

Mobile market and desktop market divergence is an interesting and growing issue for designers.
Utilising CSS design for layouts allowed for different layouts for screen, print and handheld using relevant CSS stylesheets.

This would have been ideal had Nokia, iPhone and Opera Mini decided that the handheld CSS spec would be ignored by their respective browser engines.
Media queries can be used in design to use the required CSS stylesheet, but not an ideal workaround.
Interesting article here on this

Design for the majority of your market and minimise problems for the minority where possible.

[Mark H]

I'm not so sure divergence is such an issue as it was before the iPhone came out. It browses standard sites so well that I get annoyed when I come across sites specifically designed for it. I'm sure that the mobile experience overall will improve to the extent that different sites will be unecessary. The Flash issue with the iPhone is a pain and one I'm sure Apple will deal with - using it does highlight how many sites (including some big ones which should know better) rely entirely on Flash without any "graceful degradation" at all. Or is it simply that it is now assumed that everyone does have Flash (approx 98% I understand). We will, however, be making efforts to provide non-Flash visitors with HTML which shows content where the Flash would have been, simply because it is not that difficult to do so.

[completerookie]

I use firefox and have an addin the simple disables flash unless I enable it.
when I get to the opening screen using flash, my decision is frequently , once again "walk away" - I'm normally after information, not a picture show, with all the latest "fly-in-from-the-left" and so on

[Mark H]

Thankfully the Flash opening screen has been on the internet "ten big no-nos" list for some time and is now limited to sites trying to show off but failing dismaly. Flash is appearing much more in an interactive capacity and for ehnaced product details etc which can only be an improvement on the stadard web experience.

[Paul Bulpit]

Back to the original post:

My view (for general shopping) is optimise for 1024 x 768 (i.e. 999 plus the IE slider bar) and relative sizing for above - 800 x 600 users are not really au fait with the interweb. With 17" TFTs plummetting in price and 15" CRTs impossible to give away, remaining users must be really tight, & therefore not worth selling to.

On the off-topic posts:

Relatively few people have or use mobile internet, it's still quite expensive to use - fine for important things but for shopping, wouldn't most do it from the comfort of their home, not on a train? No need to optimise yet.

And Flash - outside of the large cities/conurbations, even those paying for 8mb connections are getting nowhere near. I'm five miles from the centre of Southampton, but on a rural exchange - flash is a big turnoff for me.

And to think that only a few years ago I suffered page loads on dial-up!

[RuralWeb]

at the end of the day your site should cater for your customers so your stats will show what they are currently using and you should build to cater for it. Anything else is just guess work IMO

[wesleythorne]

hi, we use awstats, is there a way for us to track what screen resolution / size our customers are viewing on.
Having looked through it i have not found anything that resemble it.

What is the best way of finding out?
Thanks
Wesley

[jont]

You will need to add in some javascript which tests the users bowser dimensions .. a quick search on the web will throw out several options.

[completerookie]

pop over to the awstats website - its on FAQ142