The Fire Ant Gazette - A Midland, Texas Blog

Screen Resolutions
Category: Design...
Posted Saturday, October 23, 2004 at 09:20 AM [GMT-6]

Dan continues to struggle with a new layout for From Behind the Wall of Sleep, as he confronts head-on the web designer's daily frustration with the myriad browser quirks that conspire to prevent a one-style-fits-all spread.

He's got his current layout to the point where he's generally satisfied with it, except for the way it looks on a monitor resolution of 640x480. He's wondering whether he needs to tweak it some more to make it look better in that resolution.

My advice is not to worry about it. According to TrafficGeneration.com, as of July, 2004 the breakdown of screen resolutions by web surfers is as follows:

1. 1024 x 768 - 54.02%
2. 800 x 600 - 24.66%
3. 1280 x 1024 - 14.1%
4. 1152 x 864 - 4%
5. 640 x 480 - 0.6%
6. 1600 x 1200 - 0.8%
7. 1152 x 870 - 0.1%

According to these stats, which are consistent with others I've seen, 640x480 is a rapidly vanishing creature. Just as meaningful is the fact that the trend toward higher resolutions continues. In my opinion, it's not worth a redesign to address 0.6% of the market, especially for a non-commercial site.

Of course, the real wild card of this issue is not small-monitor users, but PDA/cell phone surfers. It makes my head hurt to think about that.

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Comments

Interesting. I thought that 800x600 would be leading the pack by a good margin.

Posted by: Wallace-Midland, Texas at October 23, 2004 01:40 PM

That makes two of us. It seems to be the most common size for all the freebie wallpapers available out there.

That's hardly the most scientific gauge, but still... I was guessing that people make wallpapers for the resolution they use or see others most often use.

Posted by: Mr. Freen at October 24, 2004 06:17 AM

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