What size is your screen?
When discussing website designs, we are often asked what size the "standard" screen is, or the average size that most people use. We always point out that websites need to work on a range of screen sizes. Some research we have carried out suggests that the range is even greater than we imagined.
What size screen do you run? The width is normally measured in pixels, and PCs and laptops are advertised with typical screen sizes of 1024 or 1280 pixels, or 1600 for a widescreen laptop. Then there are netbooks, some of which have 800 pixel width screens, and hand held devices with even smaller screens. But this is just the maximum width of the screen, not the space available to the webpage within the browser. The available space is restricted by the size of the window that the user is using, the thickness of the margins and scroll bars which varies from browser to browser, and whether or not the user is running any sidebars such as bookmarks or history.
We have been sampling the screen size used by visitors to some of our higher traffic sites, measuring the actual width available to the webpage, not the maximum width of the screen. We eliminated traffic which we knew to be search engine spiders and robots, and only considered people running browsers supporting JavaScript who might be considered to be the "typical" website visitor.
Out of 17,000 screens checked we expected to find at least 20 or 30 different screen sizes in use. We were amazed to find that there were in fact 1,014 distinct screen widths recorded in our traffic sample, ranging from a positively tiny 213 pixels wide to a massive 2960. The commonest size we encountered was 1259 pixels wide, used by 18% of our visitors, followed by 1003 pixels wide, used by 10% of our visitors.
For some time now, the wide screen has been a standard feature of laptops and so we expected to see evidence of this in our results. Surprisingly, less than 2% of our visitors were running browsers near the maximum screen width. The wide screen may be good for watching blockbuster movies and HDTV but for browsing the web and reading documents the proportions are all wrong and I suspect most laptop users must be running their browsers in reduced windows. The evidence suggests they are mostly settling on a size somewhere between 1300 and 1500 pixels which would give a more traditional aspect ratio for web browsing.
Over recent years, there has been a trend for screens to become bigger and bigger and huge screens are much loved by designers, but not that many large screens showed up in our sample. On the other hand, there are also more devices on the market now like netbooks, hand-held devices, mobile phone browsers such as the iPhone, all of which have limited screen real estate. We found that more than 15% of our visitors had relatively small screens of less than a thousand pixels, whilst only about 5% of visitors had screen sizes above the 1600 pixel mark.
What this tells us is that the web, far from becoming standardised, is becoming even more diverse. Successful web sites really do need to cater for that diverse audience and not expect the audience to have the same size screen as the designer.
30th April 2010
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.