When designing a website there many considerations to make, the most important one, I think, is the display resolution. As a graphic designer and as web developer I noticing that many designs breaks apart when you see them in other displays for many reasons:
- The resolution is different from the one you test it on
- The browser installed in the computer (Specially if the browser is Internet Explorer either version)
- The color set for the monitor
Only one of these factors you can control as a designer and is the number one, the different display resolutions. During the last weeks I’ve been working on a website for a client that showed me another website to use it as my paragon. The problem I noticed with the website I was referred to is that the website was design in a resolution for a display higher that 1600 px wide. If you try to see it in a monitor lower than that you might need to scroll left and right. Something not many web users like to do.
So I designed my page to fit in monitors from 1000 px and up.
Why I did this? Based in a survey made last year (January to be exact) 56% of web users around the World uses monitors that the display resolution is 1024 px wide and 768 px height. Only a 36% uses monitors over 1200 pixel wide resolution and there’s still 4% that uses 800 x 600 pixel monitors. Yeap! There’s still some ugly monitors around. But I can’t limit that much.
With this in mind I consider that the best width size for a web page would be 1000 px. That for fixed width size web page. Those who prefer to design dynamic web pages doesn’t have that bit of a problem, but still it is hard for me trying to design something that would be flow nice in a 1024 x 768 display and in a 1920 x 1200 display. For that reason I prefer to design a centralized nice 1000 pixels wide web page than a dynamic width web. The both still look good either way.
Remember, just Mac users with a new mouse has the scroll ball in the mouse and they can browse a page either way easily. But for the rest 80% percent who still has old Mac mouses and PC users the only basic scrolling option is up and down.
An user-friendly interface is one of the most basic consideration to have when building a website.
Happy Designing