How Big Is Too Big?

Posted by Steven Teskey on April 21st, 2006.

As a web designer from Calgary, Alberta, I specialize in CSS and XHTML. As well as having a background in usablilty and accessibility. I hope to bring fun back to the web, all the while feeding my passion for helping others.

http://www.unimagination.com

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In response to the other “header” related post today, I’ve decided to write about my only issue with headers. As I get into designing a site the header and navigation is ussually where I start (after all the planning of course). So after the code is done I procceed to creating the graphic design, but how big should I make it? With lots of users adopting a larger screen area I find it easy to believe that no one uses anything smaller than 1024×768. Those who run a lower resolution know that headers can easily cover half of their viewable area, and that’s just not fair.

I’m in no means saying we should all be designing for smaller screens as larger resolutions become the norm. It’s always nice though to consider others, to think interms of everyone who doesn’t own that 30″ LCD monstrocity that sits a top your desk. So I leave off asking just how big is too big for you? Do you employ specific boundaries in header design? Or do you do something entirely different? Share with me… I mean us, please.

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I try to encorporate what I assume are the maximum and minimum screen sizes in my designs. Most of the time this means using a ‘liquid layout. I do tend to ’stop’ a design at large widths as readability becomes an issue.

One point to take on board is that browser stats give the wrong impression. Seeing that 75% of fadtastic users have a resolution of 1280 x 1024 may not mean that 75% are using their browser in full-screen mode. They may also have sidebars open making the viewport smaller.

Andrew Faulkner
April 21st, 2006
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I try to follow the 12″ Powerbook rule. If it doesn’t look good on that screen, it’s probably not the best design.

Not that our current design passes with flying colors, but I always try to keep our small-screened readers in mind.

Yas
April 21st, 2006
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The 12″ Powerbook rule is a good idea. Even if you’re a designer with a huge screen at home, you may also have a laptop and almost certainly have a smallish monitor at work. That’s how it is for me at least.

Andrew W
April 21st, 2006
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Take it for what it’s worth, but this year I began designing for a width of about 820px, usually centered. It leaves the 800×600 standard behind (most new machines are shipping with 1024 resolution these days anyway), but does not get so close to 1024 that folks with laptops must scroll horizontally. Liquid layout for me is just too big a risk as I see monitors getting larger — reading text more than about 8″ across is too difficult for the eye to follow line to line. The average paperback book is maybe 6″ wide and for good reason.

Darren Hoyt
April 22nd, 2006
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About 20% of the visitors on my more popular sites use a screen resolution of 800×600px or lower so I still use 800×600 as the base resolution for most of my designs. Liquid layout is good for crossing the resolution divide but I personally feel a fixed width site provides more control and compatibility with that dinosaur, ie, plus I have yet to see a liquid layout site that looks good and still be very usable on huge monitors (20″+). Using background image ‘trickery’ is one of the techniques that can be employed effectively for users with bigger displays on a ’small width’ site.

Gomi
April 22nd, 2006
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you can serve a different stylesheet to users using eg 800 *600 design, wih Javascript you can add a listener which detects browser dimension and load the stylesheet accordingly.

Johan Van Den Rym
April 23rd, 2006
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Wait a second. You do your code first? That seems kind of backward to me, perhaps you could explain your process.

Kevin Cannon
April 24th, 2006
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I’d also be interested to hear how/why you code first. Please tell us how you do you websites. Just curious.

Andrew Faulkner
April 24th, 2006
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(off topic…)

“Liquid layout for me is just too big a risk as I see monitors getting larger — reading text more than about 8″ across is too difficult for the eye to follow line to line.”

Yep. For this reason I would recommend you use a max-width. This way you can cap the width to keep it from getting too out of hand. There are even ways of getting max-width to work reliably in IE (gasp!)

http://www.cameronmoll.com/archives/000892.html

Steve C.
April 24th, 2006
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I (as of recently) believe that most of the beauty in a webpage is in how the information is arranged. The best sites are harmonies of graphical and informational representation. It’s easy to forget that the infromation must be the focus of the website when heavy graphics are used. Hopefully that may justify my methods. I’ve been asked to explain my methods of design, so I shall endulge (even though I don’t quite think that the comments section is the place for this.

I have a habit of being somewhat sporadic, and as I really only design unformally (for myself, or for no money), I tend to change things up a lot. When I say “a lot” I mean entire layouts on a whim. To combat this I tend to start off by determining what type of information I’ll be displaying, how much information, and the best methods of displaying such information. From there I create a layout, sounds strange I know, but with an imagination like mine it’s just easier to get what I originally wanted without straying. After the layout is complete, as in all information has been displayed in a manner that’s best suited to it, I then add the graphical touches. I do minor changes afterwards, so that there isn’t any heavily conflicting design work.

Steven Teskey
April 25th, 2006
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With lots of users adopting a larger screen area I find it easy to believe that no one uses anything smaller than 1024×768

I find this statement quite shocking honestly.

Yes quite a few websites seem to be embracing the 1024 resolution as a minimum width lately - but this is usually from sites in the web design community where their audience is very computer-savvy (this very website for example).

When moving away from this kind of audience, I think the number of users still using 800×600 is quite high. One set of website stats I have access to for instance (which is from a global website, with a very wide and varied audience) can see 800×600 at something like 20%. If that website is receiving 10,000 visitors a day, should we then make 2000 of those scroll horizontally?!

Again this all comes down to “horses for courses” - where a higher screen res may be acceptable for one website but not another.

Personally, unless the website has a very computer focused audience I still think it is too soon to be disregarding the 800×600 users.

Chris Williams
April 28th, 2006
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