What Screen Resoutions Should We Be Designing For?

Filed in Coding Tips, Discussion, New Websites, Stats Reviews, Visitor Trending, reviews on May.29, 2010 By Keith Lunt

Long ago the 800 X 600 screen was the norm. Even last year, it was highly prevalent and websites had to be designed for it as well as 1600 pixel wide screens. This meant either an expanding screen to fill whatever size screen is being used, which can be problematic, or a narrow 800 pixel wide screen plonked in the middle of the screen.

But, times move on and so do screens. I have been analysing traffic over 6 different websites of my own over a short period this month. These include technical, travel, sport and home interest sites, giving a spread of interests. The totals are:

Screen Size	Visits	Percentage
1024 X 768	994	23.4%
1280 X 800	897	21.1%
1280 X 1024	568	13.4%
1440 X 900	355	8.4%
1366 X 768	262	6.2%
1680 X 1050	241	5.7%
1920 X 1200	124	2.9%
1024 X 600	89	2.1%
1152 X 864	81	1.9%
1920 X 1080	63	1.5%
1280 X 960	57	1.3%
1600 X 900	56	1.3%
800 X 600	56	1.3%
1280 X 768	56	1.3%
1280 X 720	37	0.9%
Other	315	7.4%

Note: All ‘other’ sizes were larger than 1024 X 768.

So, what do I make of this? Well the old, reliable, 800 X 600 screen size is dieing off. Down in 13th place in my chart, with less than 1.5% of visitors to these sites using that resolution. The next smallest size I saw was 1024 X 768, most popular overall and in all but one of the sites, the most popular per site, averaging almost 1 in 4 visitors.

Bye, bye 800 X 600
I think that as the year progresses, we are going to see that stats falling for the 800 X 600 screen size. It is obviously no longer popular and as people move to laptops and netbooks with built in screens, those sizes are becoming more the norm.

1024 X 768 rolls onwards
But, the traditional 1024 X 768 still rules the waves! One site did see it in second place, just, and that was the sport site. And this does give a major clue as to where the bigger screen sizes are being rolled out.

The more business orientated sites are showing as many visitors using a 1024 X 768 screen as 1280 X 800 and 1280 X 1024 put together. But, the interest based sites see that gap gone, with almost parity across the three sites. This implies that business is being slow to update to the bigger screen that home users are enjoying. At home, you are likely to have a 1280 screen.

Affecting our design decisions
So, how does this information affect the way that we should be designing websites? Well, I think it is near enough safe to say that when we design a page, we no longer need to stick to 800 pixels wide. We can now safely fill the 1024 screen width and allow for a padding of up to almost 900 pixels on the width!

As for depth, almost 3.5% of visitors were using only 600 pixel deep screens. If something cannot scroll (popup windows etc) then I would think that this is enough visitors to make you stick to that size. But, then the rest can see 768 pixels, so if we design on a 1024 X 768 screen we see the majority.

The future is the exception
However, there is one major exception that I have intentionally overlooked in all of these. One slight little white lie in the table above. On one website, hidden in the top 20 screen resolutions, was a small screen size of a mobile device. So our desktop computers might be getting bigger screens, but what about our mobile computing!

Food for thought.