Site design- Screen Size assumptions ?

[cbelt3]

Y'know, I think that giving web designers ginormous monitors is a BAD, BAD, thing. They come up with incredibly huge screen designs that normal mortals cannot have any hope of using.

Case in point was disney.com ' s "XD" game / kids site. Their flash/java/ whatever seems to assume a 30" cinema display. I had to take my old 19" monitor all the way to 1600x to see most of it, and it was still not all there. It was driving my 9 year old nuts.

Imagine if all road designers drove NASCAR cars all the time. All turns would be banked wildly, and only left turns would be allowed. This is the same thing.

If you do web design- what are your usability assumptions about screen size ?

[wolfcry911]

800 x 600 and I'll make the width 760-780px

[TheTominator]

These days I design for 1024x768 if the content really needs it. I make sure that it works OK on 800x600.

If the design doesn't really need the larger display, I design for 800x600 and make sure it works OK on larger displays. (And is usable on 640x480.)

Even people with larger displays (like me) choose to make the web browser window smaller than full screen. Mac users in particular do this. Quite a few of the Microsoft Windows users I know usually have their browser full-screen and get confused when I click the icon to let them see multiple windows.

[Mr645]

I still get people complaiing that images on my site are too big, typically 540px max dim. Most people are fine with that and no one ever complains that it's too small. I run 1280x1024 on most of my machines and the images look a bit small

[karsen]

Generally, I try to use liquid designs that scale, or never go past 720 pixels wide which fits well on all displays 800 pixels wide and up.

[mikebw]

More than 90% of people that visit my sites are 1024x768 or higher. I tend to still design for 800x600 though, this can also keep load times down if you use pre-built graphics.

If you sign up for something like Google Analytics you can find out these kind of stats for any of your own sites.