Does size matter?
Ah, the age old question – asked repeatedly by man for many, many years. I'm of course talking about screen size, or more correctly screen resolution.
Over the past decade, the typical computer screen has increased in size by a couple of inches every two to three years. As a result, the average screen resolution available today is more than four times what it was a decade ago.
How is this important to web development? Well, screen resolution impacts every possible design choice for every site we create. In order to get the largest audience for the site that we can, we need to make sure that as many visitors as possible have the ability to view it.
Many usability studies have shown that users do not have a problem with scrolling vertically to see more content; they do however hate being forced to scroll horizontally. From this, we can see that the width of the screen is the most important. What is important to bear in mind though, is that there are many different screen sizes around.
Modern computer screens can be more than 1920 pixels wide, which is a huge amount. However, consumers have recently begun to prefer smaller computers like netbooks, meaning that the long term trend of increasing screen size has been halted; the typical screen width online is now just 1024 pixels. This means that web developers such as ourselves must limit the width of the sites we design to about 1000px.
This is the approach we follow here at Base Creative – choose a sensible minimum, and create a design which takes full advantage of the space available. There are then a number of options we can follow to make use of any additional space.
So to conclude, it’s not the size, it’s what you do with it that matters!