Web Page Sizing for Monitors
In doing web design for clients, they often want nice wide pages in their web site for their high-resoultion monitors. The problem is simply that a big chunk of users don’t have anything more than a 800 X 600 screen. You force them to do horizontal scrolling to see your pages - not good.
OneState.com reports that the percent of each monitor size used on the web (global) now is as follows for the most popular monitor sizes:
With percentages dropping quickly after that. For our business site during that last week we had 57% at the 1024 X 768 and 15% at the 800 X 600. We had one user log in at 640 X 480, a pretty dead resolution now.
What this means, in simple language, is that if you don’t design for the 800 X 600 user, you are losing 15-20% of your market. One method to do this is to keep your design page size no more than 800 pixels wide. A second possible solution is to have the web page query for the user’s page size and adjust the design from that information.