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website design tips » August 2004: “Designing Web Sites for Monitor Resolution”
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Monitor Resolution, Shmonitor Resolution
by John Barrick
If you’ve been ignoring the effect monitor resolution has on your Web site designs then it is time for you to pay attention.
You can witness endless design horrors on the internet but one of the most annoying is lack of concern for monitor resolution. It has to stem from the “my monitor must be the norm” syndrome, which affects nearly everyone in the Universe until they see a familiar web site on someone else’s machine. It slowly dawns on them how different a Web site can be from machine to machine.
When I run across these types of websites, my first thought is that the designer didn’t know about monitor resolution. That can’t be true, can it? Everyone who makes Web sites knows about resolution.
Don’t They?
If you don’t know, here it is: monitors have different display resolutions that can be changed by the user willy-nilly. Some standard resolutions are 640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768. There are many others.
Your Web site looks different on each of these resolutions. Goodness help you if you’ve made your site too large for a particular resolution because people hate to scroll left and right.
You need to pick a minimum resolution before creating art for the web site. It’s a real pain to try to retrofit a site to a smaller resoluton. The current resolution Way Cool Web Design uses is 800x600 if no other size is specified by the client. A number of web sites keep some statistics on monitor resolutions used by their visitors. You may find these useful.