Designing Web Pages for Your Customers, Not for You

When thinking about web designing, bear in mind that you are not only doing it for you. You are doing it for your site’s visitors and customers.

Often, most web designers use monitor resolutions much larger or higher than most average people do. This is completely understandable to view the images, layouts, and designs pretty well. However, most amateurs take for granted how their customers or site’s visitors are viewing; while professionals usually check if their designs work for most, if not all, monitor resolutions including that for mobile devices.

“In 2007, 1024 x 768 was the most popular monitor resolution and 53% used that resolution according to counter.com stat.”

According to another research, “78% of people are on resolutions of 1280px wide or less.” See the figures below:

Also bear in mind that your site’s visitors may not see the whole thing even if they are maximizing their browsers for the same resolutions as your monitor, simply because of the tabs and toolbar that come with the browsers. Therefore this might mean that the actual screen view of your site’s visitors might be smaller than what you have set for as your resolution.

There isn’t an exact correlation but here is a good suggestion written by Jennifer Kyrnin at about.com on how to go about it.

640 x 480 = 620 x 310
800 x 600 = 780 x 430
1024 x 768 = 1000 x 600
1200 x 1024 = 1180 x 850
1600 x 1200 = 1580 x 1030

This would mean that assuming our site’s visitors are using an 800 x 600 browser window, then use the 780 x 430 to design your pages.

To illustrate what I am talking about, see below how a web page comes out for web page designed with an 950px width:

Monitor 1

Browser: Chrome 1
Monitor resolution: 1366 x 768
Comment: See the scroll bar at the bottom of the page. How many site’s visitors do you think won’t bother to scroll that? Instead leave the site and won’t bother to check it out again.

Monitor 1

Monitor 2

Browser: Chrome
Monitor resolution: 1920 x 108
Comment: Fits well for this monitor resolution. But most people may not be using such wide monitor resolutions. Do you plan to limit your site’s visitors?

Monitor 2