Once again we’re experimenting with the look and feel of our site. I don’t like “under construction” pages so I hope you’ll bear with me as we move and repurpose some of our content and finalize our new look and feel. It’s the kind of design experience I usually like to rant about rather than create.

I recently had occasion to take another look at the screen resolutions of visitors to the websites I monitor. I used Google Analytics to check the percentage of user with 800 x 600 pixel monitors who visited 9 sites during September. While the results weren’t surprising, they did represent a milestone. For the first time ever all of the sites I checked had fewer than ten percent of users viewing the site with an 800 x 600 monitor. Seven of the sites were at 6% or less with the other two hovering around 9%.

So as I said in my August post, I think it’s safe to say that 1024 x 768 is the new 800 x 600. And I’m standing by my prediction that the percentage of users with the smaller monitor will drop to 5% or less for all my sites by the end of the year.

Back in June I mentioned being surprised by the low number of visitors to this site using 800 x 600 pixel monitors. At the time the exact number was zero. Well it’s increased a bit since then. Now a whopping 0.67% of visitors here have the mini-monitors. In spite of that, I think I’ll still feel comfortable ignoring them when I get around to the redesign.

I still find those results a bit startling, so I decided to do a quick survey of a few other sites I manage. Here’s the results:

Percent of users with 800×600 monitors
Website: 2007 to date / for July 2007 (target audience)

SEOrefugee.com: 2.01% / 2.01% (search engine optimizers)

NetDetours.com: 10.31% / 7.07% (general interest)

TOONrefugee.com: 7.34% / 6.08% (general interest with focus on sports, computers, etc.)

Extrapolating (unscientifically) I’d guess that most sites have already reached the magic 10% level where it suddenly seems OK to ignore the resolution-challenged in their audience. And I wouldn’t rule out that most of them will be at the 5% level by the end of the year.

To help confirm my conclusions, I check five other sites whose information I can only share in a general manner. The highest concentration of the smaller monitors was 13%. Another site was right at the magic 10% level. A third was at 7% and the other two were below 5%.

So it looks like 1024 x 768 is the new 800 x 600.

It makes me feel old, I remember when 800 x 600 was the new 640 x 480.

While putting this site together, my son and I engaged in an argument about the ideal width of web pages.

Based upon the standard advice I give my web design students I argued for a 760 pixel width which, even with scroll bars, can easily be accommodated on an 800 by 600 pixel monitor.

He, on the other hand, argued for a wider design – somewhere in the neighborhood of 960 pixels. The advantages were obvious: we’d have additional design flexibility and be able to move to a three-column design. He also argued that people with small monitors just weren’t worth worrying about (he can be a bit judgmental).

The argument was brief and I won (it’s my site after all). Based upon other websites I monitor, I was expecting 5 to 10 percent of my audience to be using the smaller monitors and I wasn’t willing to alienate them. The result was the narrower, two-column design you’re looking at now.

The numbers are in

Now that we’ve been around for a month and had a few thousand visitors, I decided to check my Google Analytics stats and see if I’d made the right decision. It turns out the answer is an emphatic NO! Of our first 3,845 visitors only 26 (0.67 percent) had monitors narrower than 1024 pixels.

Where I went wrong

In retrospect, it appears I violated one of my own cardinal rules: consider your audience. I based my decision on numbers generated by websites targeted to a general audience. I didn’t consider that an audience of graphic design and web professionals would naturally tend to have larger (in many cases much larger) monitors.

Looking ahead

One month isn’t a scientific sample and, as time goes by, I expect we will reach a wider audience and see the number of visitors using small monitors rise a bit. Still, the numbers are impressive enough that I’m already starting to look at a redesign. After all, if I can offer a better experience to 99 percent of our audience, perhaps the 0.67 percent of designers who won’t spring for a new monitor once a decade really aren’t worth worrying about.

So, son, if you’re reading, here it is: I was wrong and you were right.