Hi - another dumb question, I work on a mac with a cinema display and when I view a Freeway project created at 900 x 700 it looks Ok but when i go to my local library or a friends house with a PC and a very ordinary display using factory settings the site in the browser window looks far too big, generally my clients want to see their site full screen without having to use the scrollbars but, of course, don’t want the site to looking too small. This is probably an age old question, ie size isn’t everything and I have read a lot of posts both here and on other sites recommending the optimum settings “… because pros are using ‘x’…” and “… most people are buying ‘y’ …” displays. Can anyone help out with the current thinking ? many thanks Roger
It depends. If there’s a large company in your client’s line of business that has obviously afforded themselves a really expensive site, then copying that size is a fairly good idea. If you know something about the demographics of your visitors, that’s another way to guess. And if you’ve employed Mint or Google Analytics on the site for a good long period of time, then you have very accurate statistics of the screen size of all the visitors who have enabled JavaScript. And that’s another really good way to know.
But in the end, you will come up with a range or percentage, and it’s up to you to strike a balance between annoying everyone and annoying the fewest visitors you can.
One thing to remember is that not everyone (even on Windows) uses their browser in full-screen mode. So if you are relying on sales figures of displays or some other metric that doesn’t actually measure the inner dimensions of the browser window on your actual audience, you are guessing.
I have been doing sites at 750 x 390* for the longest time, and it’s still a good size if you center the page horizontally. Apple used to use this width, and just recently switched to something closer to 900 wide. Personally, and especially if there’s going to be a lot of text, I don’t like a really wide site because it becomes unreadable. (Try to average 7 - 10 words per line for optimal readability in long text.)
Walter
*That absurdly short height is actually what you have left over from an 800 x 600 screen after Windows IE paints the barn with button bars and other useless chrome.
As ever Walter thanks for your very comprehensive reply and I must say probably the best explanation I’ve read, having done a search … I’ll try out those dimensions and see how they look. I also thought that by setting my view to 120% in Freeway it will give me a clearer idea of what the low res. monitors are seeing. Good of you to take the time. Have a good weekend Roger
Thanks, you too. I forgot one thing – about the height. Obviously you don’t make your site full of 390px tall pages. But do put the important first bite of information on each page above that “fold” line.