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What Screen Resolution Should You Design For

What Screen Resolution Should You Design For?

Written by Joe on Monday, January 31, 2011

It's All About The Client's Audience

With the advancement of cell phone and other hand held technologies, the need to accommodate for different screen resolutions has become a popular topic. Should every website accommodate every different screen resolution? Which resolutions should you be concentrating on? This article will help explain what screen resolution you should be designing your websites for.

Use Your Analytics

The first stop is analytics. If you already have a website and have some analytical software, such as Google Analytics, you should be able to easily find out what screen resolutions your visitors are using.

If you are using Google Analytics, here is how to find what screen resolutions your visitors are using. After logging in to your account, click view profile for the website your are looking for. On the next page, there should be a link on the left hand side of the page that says Visitors. When the visitors page loads, you should see sub navigation under the Visitors link. Click Browser Capabilities then Screen Resolutions. Here you will see a list of all of the screen resolutions your visitors are using and how many users visited with that same resolution.

Do Some Research

Talk to your client about their products, services, and target audience. Your audience will play a major role in deciding what screen resolutions to design for. For instance, if you are targeting college students, including designs for hand held devices might be advantageous for you.

Fluid vs. Static Layout

A fluid layout can expand and contract depending on the screen resolution of the user. If including lower resolutions is important but you don't want to have completely different designs, a fluid layout might be what you are looking for. There are many templates out there for fluid CSS and HTML layouts. And if you don't want to use a template, custom coding a fluid isn't that hard. But that's for another article.

A static layout is a layout the has a set width and doesn't change with the users screen resolution. While a static layout is viewable on hand held devices, users have to scroll to the sides to view content that doesn't fit on the screen, which can get annoying.