One of the first things to decide when designing a website is how wide you’re going to make it. When using a fixed width (as opposed to a fluid layout) we need to decide exactly how many pixels we’re going to make it. Unfortunately, like most web design techniques, it’s not an exact science therefore we utter the all too familiar words of “developing for the majority”. We begin…

Firstly, let’s take a look at some popular fixed width websites to see what they are doing. We’ve broken this down by theme since the theme will affect the desired width. For example, news related websites tend to require more space since they need to get more information on the page. On the other hand, a typical company website has less information to convey and does not require such a wide page.

We’ve chosen the latest crop of websites to show how cutting-edge websites are being designed. Given the rate of change within the industry there would be no use in giving examples of websites designed even 2 years ago.

News
BBC (www.bbc.co.uk): 770 pixels
The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk): 940 pixels

Social Networking
YouTube (www.youtube.com): 855 pixels
Facebook (www.facebook.com): 780 pixels

Technology
Microsoft (www.microsoft.co.uk): 934 pixels
Apple (www.apple.com): 980 pixels

General Sites
British Airways (www.britishairways.com): 760 pixels
Ferrari (www.ferrari.co.uk): 950 pixels

Now, let’s take a look at some stats - what screen resolutions are our visitors using?

The latest stats from W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) from January 2007 show the following screen resolution figures:

• Higher: 26%
• 1024×768: 54%
• 800×600: 14%
• 640×480: 0%
• Unknown: 6%

It’s clear that the majority (80%) of Internet users are currently using 1024×768 and above. However, a large minority are still using 800×600 – causing somewhat of a dilemma. Should I design for the 80% at the expense of compromising the browsing experience of the 14%, or, keep the 14% happy and fail to make the most out of the space provided by the 80%?

Once we have taken into account the scroll-bar and other possible side-bars we can discount around 30 pixels from the page width, giving us around a minimum of 770 pixels to play with.

It’s worth noting that 14% of the world’s Internet population is around 164 million users. The latest stats show over 1.1 billion Internet users worldwide. And it’s growing…

So, how wide should you go?

There’s been a significant shift over the past year or so with more websites pushing the width to 1024×768. More and more Internet users are becoming ‘web savvy’ and are increasing their resolutions accordingly. Your target audience plays a big part in your choice of design. The latest social networking sites are primarily targeted at 16-30 year olds, which are far more likely to be running a larger screen resolution.

Every designer will have their own opinion (and it is an opinion) on the page width dilemma. When we are confronted with a new design project we ask ourselves the following questions:

“Is there lots of content which needs to be displayed on a page OR is the target audience 16-30? If so, then consider designing for 1024×768, otherwise, go for 800×600.”

Of course, it is entirely possible to create a website which caters for both. Using CSS to control the width of the page (and page elements) it is possible to have different versions depending on the screen resolution. Remember to keep it simple though since we don’t want to go down the route of past years when we had different websites for the multitude of browsers and screen resolutions!

We’re seeing more and more users on higher screen resolutions so it won’t be too long before the minimum resolution will be somewhere around 980 pixels. Until then, we must take the 800×600 users seriously.

For more information on web development please contact us on +44(0)1202 315285 or info@acmultimedia.co.uk. Learn more about AC Multimedia.

Website Design resolution, width