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Monitor Size does Matter by Nicola Beaumont

You can't provide for every variable, but you can make your site easy viewing for as many as possible.

So you’ve decided to build a webpage:

You’ve set your theme
You’ve even designed a great background image.
All your colours coordinate
You’ve come up with a great template system that ensures all your pages are streamlined and match perfectly.

As you launch your newly designed site, your excitement builds. You tell all your friends and family to check it out, but to your chagrin, instead of kudos, you receive comments such as:

"It looks good, but why do you have your background image repeating like that?
It’s distracting
It’s fine, but why did you make it scroll sideways. It’s hard to read that way.”

There’s something seriously wrong, you think. You made sure your background image didn’t repeat; after all, who wants to see a book cover and a half? And your page doesn’t scroll sideways on your computer. What’s the deal?

Well let me tell you the deal.
Different computers are configured with different screen resolutions, and monitors come in a multitude of sizes. When building your website, remember to take these things into consideration.

If you have a large monitor (say 19"), you will see more on the screen at one time than someone who is using a 14" or 15" monitor. That means that if you build your website to use every bit of your 19”, then surfers with smaller screens are going to have to scroll sideways in order to see all the information—even if they have their screen resolution set to match yours.

To avoid this, keep your pages narrow on your large screen—they'll take up the entire screen on a smaller computer, but they won’t overflow.

The flip side is if you have a smaller monitor. Using the example of the repeating background, if you design a background that you don’t want to repeat, and you have a 14” or 15” monitor to which your background fits exactly, someone viewing your site on a 19” monitor is going to have more viewing room, and so the background will repeat.

To avoid this, either

set your background to a fixed position that prohibits it from repeating,
or
incorporate a solid colour on the right side of your background image (as part of the image) in order to accommodate those larger monitors.

The next consideration is screen resolution. All things being equal, a 19” monitor set to a screen resolution of 600x800 isn’t going to display as much on the screen at one time as a 19” monitor set at 1280x768.

When you’ve built a couple of pages, change your screen resolution and see what other people might be seeing.

You can't provide for every variable, but you can make your site easy viewing for as many as possible.

Nicola Beaumont has been designing websites for herself and others for about a decade. She’s made every mistake imaginable, including building pages that only looked good on her own monitor. She is an author of fiction and non-fiction. You can visit her online at www.inicola.net.