Avoiding this is obvious to most of us, but hardly anyone knows the majorities screen resolution.

The pie-chart on the left points out a blue, 44,46% big field which indicates 1024×768 pixel resolution. This trend is continuous throughout a significant amount of the websites I follow.

But don’t be prejudiced about your users. An older demographic will most likely tend towards a higher resolution because the appearance of the site will conceivably be bigger. While younger users will most likely tend towards a smaller resolution because of the billions of other applications they will have to monitor aside from the website they are currently reading. Furthermore, we have to think of national issues in reference to visitors from less wealthy countries, who will most likely not have access to high resolution displays.

The ultimate compromise would seemingly consist of creating a variable width template which would take care of these issues once and for all, right? Wrong, because you (or your designers) will experience devastating limitations in terms of creativity and enriching your web site’s content with appropriate imagery. This resulting out of the fact that the images would either be not wide enough for big displays or too small for mobile devices.

The conclusion and only way to be least screwed is to take a fixed width design which is under 1000px of width and to provide barely enough content to make it obsolete to scroll vertically.

Did we forget something? Oh, yes… the constantly growing amount of mobile users. The simplest way would be to create an alternative template or landing page for them with browser recognition.

Now we’ve got pretty much everybody served and happy

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You have to consider more than just the general opinion for this one. Reason being: if your targeted group of website visitors focuses upon an older generation you definitely want to go more towards usability. Same of course applies for inexperienced users.

Yet if you know that the demographical issue tends more towards a young group of web-experienced people (gender plays a major role also) you’ll be better off making menus available at the intro page.

Furthermore, you might consider responsive disclosure as a menu aspect, which only reveals certain menu points upon user action. This may be interesting if you have to have a lot of menu buttons but are stuck – for instance – with an older audience.

That is just one of the many issues involved in that matter. Give me a call if you need more.

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