cheung.co.uk

When I first started designing and developing websites 8 or so years ago there were a few rules of thumb that I adhered too. One of the main issues was how big to have my containing table for the web page ie to design for 640×480 or 800×600 screen resolutions. This was to cater for what was thought to be the lowest common denominator - those with small 14 or 15 inch monitors.

Thus my table widths were 600 pixels which left room for the vertical scroll bar and eliminated horizontal scrolling which was and still is a big no-no. This was fine for a while but then as new computers came shipped with larger monitors my standard table width increased to around 760 pixels.

I still design to this size, without using a containing table or course, but have also designed sites with a width of 800+ pixels to optimise for 1024×764 resolutions. I also now try to use a liquid layout where possible as this increases a site’s accessibility. Such sites will look fine on all screen resolutions including mobile devices such as PDAs and mobile phones.

Another rule of thumb when designing a site was to stick to web safe colours (216 of them) when using background and font colours. Once again this was to cater for those whose monitors ran with only 256 colours. Nowadays I usually stick to websafe colours for text only. Nobody runs a monitor with only 256 colours, do they?

The idea to write this article came whilst I was travelling in South America. I visited many internet cafes to check my email and surf the web and found that a lot of the machines I used were quite old. Some were so old that they were running Windows 98 on a 14 inch monitor with a screen resolution of 640×480 and 256 colours. Here was my lowest common denominator 8 years ago, existing now. I can’t remember the last time I built a website which was optimised for a 640×480 screen resolution but I know it was a long time ago.

I suppose it is ignorance on my part to assume that old computers are not in use anymore. I do still check my sites in old browsers such as IE5 and IE5.5 and occasionally see how it may look at different resolutions using the Resize option on the web developers toolbar in Firefox. However I no longer design with a page width of 600 pixels and will not start doing so again.

According to Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox on Screen Resolution and Page Layout we should ‘Optimize Web pages for 1024×768, but use a liquid layout that stretches well for any resolution, from 800×600 to 1280×1024.’

He also states that about 60% of all monitors are set at 1024×768 and 17% use 800×600 and less than half a percent use 640×480. I’m not quite sure where these statistics come from but if they are correct, then less than half a percent is not a lot. He thus believes that ‘giving them a less-than-great design is an acceptable compromise.’ And for once, I tend to agree.