Is there a standard, or default, size (in pixels) for web pages, based on the average monitor and resolution?
It’s good to keep abreast of trends in what people are using to browse.
Some servers keep track of the information that your computer sends them regarding stats like screen resolution.
Up until surprisingly recently, the majority of screens were still only 800x600, but in the past couple of years, the majority has been 1024x768
So I often set my monitor to that resolution when I’m designing a page.
No.
Different web designers may use differnt standard sizes for a particular web site, but there is no formal standard. For sites where most of the content is dynamically generated, there may not even be a standard size within that website.
Nowadays if someone was going to pick a standard size 1024 x 786 would probably be it. Some of the older recommendations and many of the current accesibility Nazis would suggest 640 x 480. IMHO 640x480 is stupid.
Evolt on why 640x480 isn’t dead yet. Your screen feels happy! Your screen feels happy!
Keep this in mind: Not everyone browses with a maximized browser window. Plenty of people with large, resolution-rich screens like to keep their browser windows relatively small so they can do things like read email and news on the same screen at the same time. (I personally like virtual desktops, but then I’m a Linux geek and assume X11 to be the Way and the Light. ;)) So regardless of what physical monitors you can reasonably assume, there isn’t much about behavior you can assume. Forcibly resizing windows is a Bad Thing and will drive people away, but you knew that because you aren’t a complete and total moronic asshole.
I’m curious about this… the browser sends stats on screen resolution? I’m familiar with a lot of the HTTP headers. There’s one that says what your browser version is. But screen size?
Personally, we recommend a width of 770 or 760 to most of our clients unless they insist otherwise. This fits nicely on a 800x600 screen and takes into account the scrollbar on the browser.
About half the time we design it to fit at least into 760 without causing sidescroll and set the contents to flow out to 100% (we call this liquid design).
In the case of designing for 800x600 we consider everything above the 450 pixel mark to be “above the fold”.
This guy seems to have gone all-out analysing actual screen real-estate.
If you look at monitor sales, 17-19 inch appears to be the “standard” size for starters. Roughly speaking that equates to the 800x600 pixel web page browser window size. That’s because the 13-15 inch monitors everyone bought the first time so many years ago was equated with the 640x480 pixel resolution limitation for the browser window.
Keep in mind that not everyone views a web page in a browser window covering the entire monitor view. This is becoming more exact as folks move into LCD monitors, widescreen monitors, etc., where the combination of monitor size and greater pixel resolution means “full size” web pages in larger browser windows with plenty of extra monitor real estate to see additional windows.
So what’s all this mumbo jumbo mean? You won’t go wrong creating a site design for a 640x480 browser window site (actual web page real estate is something like 576x370?). But you will be seen as so Stone Age web that it might hurt. The 800x600 browser window size is still considered by many as the “standard,” however the 1024x768 really has a solid foundation now. I say that because if you pick a few benchmark web sites, they’s gone for the 1024x768 browser window as standard. CNN went that route several months back. Yahoo recently did a big facelift as well.
What skews the stats is the web page real estate size is debated by webbies and techo-jockies among themselves. They seem to spend too much time arguing the issue and forget a significant point – web stats of users (and their screen resolutions) is far more important than the monitor sizes of the webbies who build the sites.
A quality web designer takes all this into account and probably has moved to liquid and elastic designs, knowing you can create a sweet spot that looks good at 800x600 and 1024x768. Since most of the web IMHO is crap, that means there is plenty of new work and retro-work on bad sites for quality web designers for a long time to come.
I’m no http expert, but a quick poke around the web suggests that the screen resolution is gathered by a script on the page.
If you Google “screen resolution statistics” the first few results are links to sites that publish this information. Various servers are saying now that anywhere from 50% to 80% of visitors to their sites are using 1024x768, which was not the case a fairly short time ago.
W3Schools Web Statistics
Browser News Statisics
Web Central Web Statistics
Taming the Beast Web Statistics
The idea behind HTML is to give a style guide, not to be some sort of desk top publishing system.
Unfortunately a lot of people don’t know that.
The early web pages foolishly all followed the original page designing software, and made pages that when printed would be one 8-1/2 x 11 sheet of paper.
This came from the origin of “hypertext” as a documntation system with links simply being ways to tie topics together, comparable to printed footnotes.
This was also how we got the early web convention of the main page having just a logo and an Enter button. It was the cognate of a pamphlet’s cover page. Then followed the index page, and it would end with an author bio page.
That whole setup thankfully eventually disappeared as people did more with sites than print them out.