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Design Tip:
Screen Width
by Tom Dahm,
Chief Operations Officer,
NetMechanic, Inc.
What size screen should you design you Web page for? The answer to this depends on the monitor resolution used by your site's visitors. Data from the latest Georgia Tech Graphic, Visualization, & Usability Center (GVU) survey suggests that 800x600 pixels is becoming the standard screen resolution.
Screen resolution is a major Web design issue. If you design your page for a high resolution monitor, visitors with lower resolution screens will have to scroll to the right to view parts of the page. One school of thought is to design "liquid pages" that adjust to the visitor's screen size. This is done by defining the width of HTML tables used for page layout in terms of screen percentages. A table that covers to entire width of the screen is set to WIDTH="100%." However, this gives less control over the position of page elements within the table. As a result many Web designers prefer to define their table width in terms of pixels.
But if you use this approach, what pixel width should you use for the screen size? The conventional wisdom has been to design to the smallest screen width in common usage. That means designing for a 640x480 pixel screen.
That's where data from the latest GVU survey comes in handy. According to GVU's latest data, as of April 1998 16.6% of all Internet users is a monitor resolution of 640x480. That represents a downward trend from 19.95% in October 1996. In contrast, 28.4% of users have a monitor set to 800x600 pixels. That represents an increase from 17.67% in October 1996.
Does this mean that you should start designing your pages for 800 pixel width? That's a design tradeoff you'll have to make in building your pages. Sixteen percent of your audience is still a lot of users. A rule of thumb used by many designers says that, if a feature isn't available to 90% of your audience, you shouldn't count on it. GVU also states that their survey respondents tend to be more computer literate and spend more time online that the average Web surfer. They are therefore more likely to be using larger monitors and higher resolution screens. But the trend is clear and suggests that before long you may want to design for 800 pixels.
Important Note: Keep in mind that whatever monitor resolution you choose for your design, your HTML tables should be set to some lesser number of pixels. If you're target.is a 640 pixel monitor, set your tables to about 600 pixels wide; if your target is an 800 pixel monitor, set your tables to be about 750 pixels wide. This allows room for the browser's scroll bar, which takes up a portion of your screen width.
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