800×600 is dead, almost
We were just revisiting an old client’s site, and we were struck by how narrow the design looks, having been designed to fit on 800 pixel screen widths. (My MacBook Pro’s “squat” 1440×900 screen definitely exaggerates this effect.)
It used to be considered a best practice to design websites for 800×600 pixel displays. This width is pretty narrow on modern desktops and laptops whose default resolutions are usually upwards of 1024×768. It also significantly constrains sites that could use the extra screen real estate to make more content visible or enable features that are impractical on narrow screens.
How many people are still using 800×600 screen resolutions? We looked at Google Analytics results for various client web sites to find out if we can relax our design constraints. Here are percentages of visitors with 800×600 screen resolution that visited various client sites over the last 3 months:
- 1.42% – Our site
- 2.65% – Consumer travel
- 3.36% – Consumer services
- 2.17% – Business services
- 1.67% – Business high tech goods
- 3.17% – Real estate
- 2.28% – Software development tools
These numbers suggest that 800×600 resolution has become a relatively insignificant percentage of site visitors and that designers should update their minimum design criteria (for non-mobile applications) to 1024×768.
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February 11th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
Funny you should wonder that, I’m working on a MID project right now that has an 800×480 screen. A lot of portable devices use this resolution or even less. I guess if you want to make your site phone-friendly, you will have to either keep it low-rez or serve a low-rez version to phone browsers such as fennec.
February 11th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
That is a good point, Rich, hence the caveat at the end about mobile applications. Even with better screens and good scrolling capabilities, 800×600 may still be too much for sites intended for mobile use. For sites intended for smaller platforms, I would recommend different designs, possibly achieved with different CSS files. This is not only a resolution issue, it’s also very likely that the interface constraints affect user behavior. Mobile users may even have entirely different site usage goals which necessitate a different design.