rYnoweb: Fixed Width Sites; Have the rules changed?

Only 20% @ 800×600 as of Jan 2006 and decreasing at a rate of 5% every 6 months. That means in 2 years (or so), virtually no one will have 800×600 resolutions.

Why?

Mainly because of the rapid decline in cost of LCD displays, which provide default resolutions set higher than 800×600. Larger monitors are less expensive and more people are buying them. As a result, the average screen resolution is increasing pretty quickly.

Should we continue to design for 800×600? I can see it both ways. You never really want to make your site hard to use (ie, horizontal scroll bars) for 20% of your visitors, but at the same time, it’s important to push forward with advances in technology. It’s the same argument web designers had for years on whether to design with consideration to older browsers (Netscape 4.x, anyone?).

So what is the answer?

Liquid sites seem to be a good answer, and are the answer for many websites. But with websites that have tons of content that need high priority, designing a liquid website that has optimal usability across all resolutions is nearly impossible.

Take Yahoo for example. Tons of content, all high priority, and you know they are paying top dollar for graphic designers, usability experts and interface designers. Instead of a liquid website, they chose to offer it in 2 sizes. Why didn’t they just make it liquid? It’s more difficult than most people realize when you’re dealing with that much content.

With liquid websites, you lose a certain amount of control over where items appear on your web page. Sure, you know the general location, but the user’s resolution and window size can cause navigation to wrap or break, related items to end up too far apart, cause important items to fall below the pagefold or any other number of problems.

Make no mistake, I can promise the placement of every single item on Yahoo’s new homepage was given much consideration and probably caused months of arguing and tweaking. With a website like Yahoo, where a slight dip in traffic to certain sections can cost them tens of thousands of dollars in revenue, you’d rather have total control of what the website looks like to the user.

Thus, it makes more sense (at least to me) to release 2 sizes rather than have a liquid website. Pretty smart move when you consider they automatically detect your screen resolution and serve you the correct layout. Now, they’re not giving up any usability at all for the 80% just to service the 20%. They’re actually taking care of both screen sizes to the best of their design ability.

Just my 2 cents!

In summary:

Without proper research and usability testing it’s near impossible to know the surfing habits and screen configuration of your users. So as hardware advances, and users slowly adjust to using larger screen resolutions and wider viewports, and as designers continue to push this envelope, I continue to believe that a liquid layout of sorts is the safest way to accommodate everyone.

It seems we all agree!

The biggest issue with PCs these days is the need for backward compatibility. We see it in the Vista development (supporting old drivers, etc) and we see it here with support for the 800×600 which is like 10 yrs old….

Why are people ok with buying a new car every few years, but they have a problem buying new PCs? People buy new TVs, buy DVD players when VHS is going away, why do we in the software/IT/computer world feel the need to support everyone under the sun?

And Yahoo isn’t saying you can’t use their site if you have an old 15″ monitor, just that you will have to deal with the hassle of leftright scrolling….

[translated: there's an 800x600 version, and as far as I know, it might even DETECT your resolution and pick the correct page size.]