The Great Debate of Web Design – 1024 x 768 or 800 x 600?
Recently, I have been doing a lot of web projects for different clients and due to the demographics of the users of those websites, I have been caving in to 1024 x 768 design. I have read recently on a number of blogs and forums that people are pushing the 1024 design scape as the new thing. Even W3Cschools says so:
Statistics are important information. What you can read from the statistics below is that Internet Explorer 6 is the most common browser, XP is the most dominating operating system, and most users are using a display with 1024×768 pixels or more, with a color depth of at least 65K colors.
However, I always take a “most users” with a grain of salt, because really it comes down to who the audience is. For the projects I am working on, our profiles tell us that the users are mostly business oriented working on PC’s with resolution at or above 1024 x 768. So that design makes sense. However, I am still of the mindset that the lowest common denominator is always the best in terms of design mechanics.
If I am designing a website to be used by the general public, should I go 1024 or 800 wide? Again, let’s go back to the users on the site. Is this a health related website where people may be older or have a low resolution to get larger typefaces, then you should use 800 x 600. If this is a website for teenagers who want to see high resolution videos and lots of content on a single screen, I think 1024 x 768 is valid.
However, shouldn’t we consider, at least for US websites, that a baby boomer generation is going to be increasingly internet savvy and going to be conducting more and more business from home and work online, thereby necessitating a 800 x 600 resolution? On the contrary, should we also assume that displays are going to be getting cheaper and larger and as a result resolutions may continue to increase?
I’d love to hear some designers input on how they go about choosing 1024 x 768 over 800 x 600 in these various situations.
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I will often go 733px wide centered, and make sure that the most significant text information shows on the screen at 800×600.
We try to “be nice to Opera” and it is less than 2%. W3Cschools says that it is used by 14% of their tech savy visitors, so in the real world it is more so I try to “be nice to 800×600″.
I think you hit it on the head when you said take a look at your audience. In my case the company I design for has an older demographic. I can tell you from our analytics software that the majority of our visitors (54%) use a resolution of 1024 X 768, however 800 X 600 is the second most used resolution at 17%. I would love to go to 1024 X 768 but the fact that we still have 17% of our visitors on a lower resolution prevents me from making the jump. I look at it this way, at 800 X 600 our site is usable to virtually anyone of our visitors, if we designed for 1024 X 768 it may still be usable but annoying to those still at 800 X 600. The other option is to design a fluid layout, not necessarily one that expands to fill every resolution, but one that works at 800 X 600 with no side scroll but looks better at 1024 X 768 or higher.
I agree Matt. I think having a fluid website is a great option for designers that want to optimize their content for 1024×768 users but will still work and not necessarily annoy 800×600 users. For the particular websites that I design, I aim for 1024×768 but at my work, I have an older computer and I know I get annoyed sometimes by certain websites that look huge on my monitor screen.
Yeah, I’m completely agree with Tiffany, we can’t ignore 800×600 users. They will get annoyed if we use full span of 1024×786. Scene will change in few years when the 800×600 will become out of date and almost dead. Fluid website is a good alternate of it but its a little tedious and lengthy work for web designers.
At play also is printer friendliness. Of course, print specific stylesheets will help, but in many older configurations when a user prints a webpage too wide, it can make things run amuck.