Here is a quick question. in most layout tutorials they tell you to create a document somewhere in the range of 500 x 800 usually. sometimes smaller and sometimes larger. they say this because they say most people still use a screen with this average setting. I disagree, I myself use a flat screen with a resolution of 1280 x 1024. Most of the people I know use flat screens now and none of them are smaller than 17 inches. this being the case, what is the industry standard now for web design resolution?

There are still a lot of people on 800 x 600 resolution with 15" monitor. I have read that the present industry standard is 1024 x 768. I have 2 Desktops and 1 Laptop. 1 Desktop is on 800 x 600 (15" monitor) and other is on 1024 x 768 (19" monitor). The Laptop is on 1280 x 1024. With a good design and the proper use of CSS you can satisfy the majority of people viewing the site.

I normally stick to 1024 x 768 myself. Sort of a happy medium and you cant cater for everyone;)

Most authorities agree with the 800x600 as a rule of thumb simply because you encompass a broader audience. Since screen sizes vary from one extreme to another, so does screen resolutions. If you own a website the site statistics option offers a good and convenient way of monitoring the screen resolution sizes of the viewers that visit your site. Taking an average over a period of time of these statistics will help you determine what would be the optimum resolution for your particular site. You cant cater to everyones needs but if youre after a larger viewership and not want to limit your site to only a certain sector of the population, then averaging offers a safe point measuring stick.

Good advice Quest! I actually forgot about my stats for viewers screen size. Mine is about 80% 1024 x 768 And the remainder is 800x600; with a couple larger resolutions. Interesting;)

thanks for the input guys. Me and a few other people have been debating for the last couple. It is great to get a broader spectrum.

Quest, How can you access the "Site Statistics"?

Fran, if you have a stat counter on your webpage hosted by some other server, often they supply you with statistical feedback of recent visits to your site.

Attached Link: Http://cg-quest.com

If you own your own website, the host usually provides you with a site statistics option. At my website (presently not operational) the host, Bravenet in my case, the site owner registers with a statistics sponsor and they provide you with the code to insert onto your opening page. The statistics gives you everything from how many visitors youve had in any given time, page most visited, day of the week and time of most visits, what browsers your visitors were using, their screen size resolutions, visitors OS and so on.

Check on the link above:

At the bottom of the page youll see a link to view my sites statistics. First a screen will come up giving you the general statistics. If you click in any of the little graph icons, the statistics for that particular option will come up. See the section called Top Statistics. This gives everything even broken down to percentages. As for this post, click on screen resolution youll see that most of the visitors to my site use 1024x768 resolution 46.92% at this time. 27.12% at 800x600, 21.38% at 1280x1024. Now if you click on the Operating System graph icon, youll see that 47.71% of my visitors use Window XP, 21.92% use Windows 98, 14.18% use Windows 2000 and 10.74% use Windows Me.

Message edited on: 01/30/2006 10:54

Well, I found the Site stats, but mine don't look like that, and I can't find anything about screen resolutions on mine... ho hum.

Well, sorry to hear that Fran. Sometimes the stats are only made available to the site owner and not the viewing public in its totality and to allocate them you might have to logon to a specific page on the host site. Also you might have the option to sign on with different stats sponsors, some may offer more variety in their stats service.

If worst comes to worst, from our discussion above, at least in Sans and my stats you can see that basically, at least at the moment, you would fare well if you sized your web site to either 800x600 or 1024x768. Whereas Sans stats indicate that 80% of his viewers logon at 1024x768 and the remaining 30% at 800x600. In my case 47% logon at 1024x768 the remainder at varying screen resolutions of which 27% is 800x600.

Together the two screen resolutions cover 74% of viewership in my case and 100% in Sans case. In both cases it seems 1024x768 has the leadership but varies between the two sites.

Web site resolution has a lot to do with what the particular site caters to. If the site is basically a message site or a How To site obviously they dont require the higher resolution. But if you plan to gallery high res images like most here do, then the higher resolution might be best for you.

Message edited on: 02/01/2006 06:38

Quest,

That's what I was thinking, i.e. High res, 1024x768.

And yeah, makes a difference who the target audience is. P.S. the site stats give me 3 or 4 different ways of looking at the stats, they just aren't the same as yours.

Message edited on: 02/02/2006 17:14