Screen resolution.

No, I’m not talking about how Hi-Def your HDTV is. (Although I’m sure you’d be happy to tell me.)

Yes, I’m talking about your online audience’s display resolution. While the subject sounds much more stale than your HDTV, it just might help afford you an upgrade.

Don’t Design Outside of the Box

Many designers seem to design without giving any thought to the visible width and height of the end users’ display. Having dabbled in design myself, I have also been guilty as charged, many times over.

As technology advances, enabling screen resolutions to grow and costs to drop, the problem of designing sites too large to fit users’ screens seems to have lessened, but it is still a problem. As your users’ screens get larger, guess what? So does your designer’s, and probably at an even greater rate.

In fact, right now I am staring at a screen that takes up half of my desktop and has a resolution of 1920 x 1200. I’m pretty confident that mine is bigger than yours, and unfortunately there’s a decent chance my design will reflect that.

Of course if you are a true purist you will say that one should always design using a fluid layout, like Jakob Nielson points out. While I completely agree in theory, in practice, designers are too meticulous about their layouts to let them be stretched, squashed, poked and prodded at.

What Screen Resolution Should I Design For?

Note: The following statistics were taken from W3CSchools.

Display Resolution Statistics:

Yes, many more people are using high resolution monitors, but the majority of people are viewing web sites at 1024 x 768 resolution.

So, design for 1024 x 768, and remember the browser window takes up a lot of that real estate.

Personally I try to use 960 for the width. I attended a few Cameron Moll sessions last year at WDW Seattle, and his argument for using 960 was a good one. It’s divisible by 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, and 16 which means your grid options are endless, and of course it fits within the most popular 1024 width.

That’s all fine and good, and isn’t too shocking, but what is unfortunate is how many designers ignore the arguably even more important height dimension.

If you need to keep content above the fold, I would use 525 as your line of demarcation. This is especially important for landing pages where the call-to-action needs to be ‘in your face.’

Yes, You Should Give a Damn About Screen Resolution

Look at this example.

Using 1024 x 768 for my display resolution, I performed a search on Google for ‘kids toys’ and clicked on this recognizable brand in the Sponsored Links. This is what I saw above the fold:

No, the giant in-your-face area is not clickable.

If you were to scroll down you’d see a couple of smaller call-to-action areas that are, but you’ve already lost me.

First of all, that whole area should be clickable, but minimally the primary call-to-action NEEDS to be above the fold. If the designer had tested this on the most common screen resolution, I think they would have made some different decisions.

In contrast I did a search for Luxury Cars and every one I checked out worked well on my screen:

I would change a few things on this landing page, but the point is the designer got all of the pertinent information above the fold.

I will concede that it’s much safer now to design web pages and landing pages bigger, but look at the statistics, decide where your target audience most likely falls, and then be sure to test your designs before launch.

OK, a little background: Sandra and I did a webinar for Aquent last month, and had over 2000 people register to attend. We thought that was pretty great. They also mentioned they were going to also put our slides up on SlideShare, but we didn’t think too much about that at the time.

In a follow-up post from the Aquent blog, Matt Grant noted that SlideShare had featured our presentation on the home page at one point, and that over 8000 people had viewed it so far. Wow. As Sandra said, we’d have spent more time on those slides if we knew they were going to get that kind of play. Anyhow, I went over to SlideShare to check it out and halfheartedly thought “I wonder if we’re on the Most Viewed list.” But we weren’t… Wait, that only shows the current day’s most viewed. What if I click This Week? Bingo:

That’s 8595 views for our presentation vs. 7354 views for Ms. Jolie.

As it’s taken me two weeks to complete this post due to a blog platform issue, my fifteen minutes of fame are long gone now. But still… to have our presentation get more views than something titled “Angelina Jolie Pictures” feels like a pretty major accomplishment. Especially with such unalluring title slide.

And now we’re the 6th Most Viewed for the month, still just ahead of Angelina. See it for yourself, before we roll off.

Maybe there’s a market for this whole Web Design for ROI thing after all…