At 10:12 PM 09/28/1999 , Jim Meagher wrote:

>Bob, I think your statistics on the "typical surfer" are out of date.  Early
>last year, one of the e-zines (websitejournal.com) I subscribe to, published
>the results of some college's survey (I could search their archives for the
>college name if it is important).  There were over 6 million replies from
>domains all over the world and the greatest marjority of the respondents
>were using 800 x 600 -- by more than three to one.  I don't remember the
>exact
>percentages, but 800 x 600 was up in the mid-60 percents while 640 x 480 was
>in the low 20's and 1024 x 768 was in the very low teens.  The interesting
>counter point to this is, that many (most?) of those running 1024 x 768 and
>lower were only using 256 colors


I have no facts of figures to base my opinions about the resolutions most
in use today for surfing the Internet...   and you maybe right.  I wish I had
more time to investigate these issues.  I discovered a long time ago that
when you start designing a web site, (for that matter any Internet driven service),
based on any theory that those people utilizing technology considered to
be antiquated by standards of Silicon Valley, are not important to your
design or of value, you are in fact deciding to focus your audience.
Consider how many people would not visit or at least revisit a web site
if they discovered half the page was not visible to one side or the other...
requiring them to constantly scroll right and left.

It is always easier to design with the latest technology in mind...  designing
for 800x600, with a message that states it is designed for that resolution only.
That tells the visitor that the web page author has little clue what he is really doing.
There are Java scripts that can resize the page based on the browser's resolution,
but then if the user has Netscape v2 or v3...  the Java script may not work.
There are other tricks available to a web page author to make the site usable to
all resolutions, but the best and easiest is to design with the 640x480 user
in mind as well as the higher end computer users.  Someone with a resolution
of 1024x768 will most likely have highspeed access...  but if we design with
that in mind, we bulk up the site and now even these users will refuse to visit
based on time for the page to download.

We can also design in Shockwave with very dramatic effect...  sound, motion
and more...  but, you are really going to impress someone with a 4mg video
card and 32mgs of ram when this bloated visual display begins to drag their
system resources into the toilet or lock up the computer.

That is off track for our discussion.  The main principle here is to decide the
nature of your audience, decide if you want to be available to everyone
or just that percentage of the Internet with the technology to appreciate your
design.   The primary reason for building any web site is to generate traffic
to the site...  to do that it must be viewable by everyone, it must load as fast
as possible, (graphic sizes must be kept small), and it must have content that
appeals to people.   So, in the final analysis...  even if 640x480 makes up
only 20% or more...  do you really want to exclude 20% of the available
audience??

                 Bob Wright
        The NOSPIN Group, Inc
http://nospin.com - http://nospin.org

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