Keep Screen Resolution in Mind when Designing your Website

If you don't design web pages everyday, it can be easy to forget what your site looks like on your computer, may not be the way it looks on your customer's computer. I experienced this issue earlier today.

I have been setting up some new websites recently using my laptop. It has the screen resolution set at 1280 x 800. Earlier today, I visited one of my sites from another computer with a resolution of 800 x 600 screen resolution. The results weren't pretty.

Even though the site looked perfect on my laptop, on a screen resolution of 800 x 600, the site ran off the page. The user would have to scroll back and forth to read the content. This is not exactly what I had in mind when I setup the page. I visited a few more of my recently created sites and as I feared, this was an issue with all of them.

I spent nearly 5 hours correcting these sites to work with a screen resolution of 800 x 600 and up. If you are using a 640 x 480 or less resolution, welcome to the 21st century and upgrade.

Another thing to keep in mind is not only can the screen resolution make a huge difference on how your site displays, so can the browser your customer is using. I guess you can load every browser on your computer and adjust your screen resolution back and forth to see how your site displays. The much better option is to visit Browser Shots. You can choose from dozens of browsers and screen sizes. Once you make your choice, you just press a button and over the course of a few minutes, thumbnail images of your choices will be displayed.

This site is a huge time saver. I definitely placed a bookmark in my browser.

Good Luck with your web design.

Brent Crouch

Posted by: Brent Crouch on 25 Apr, 2007No Comments »