Re: Browser Resolution

G'day

> Reading through some of those stats I think confirms that you still have to
> design pages for 13 to 15 inch monitors - with the move positively towards
> the 15 inch.

13 to 15 inch monitors runing at what resolution?  I have a 15 inch monitor
which can run at anything from 320x200 to 1280x1024 pixels, though I normally
run at either 800x600 or 1024x768.  So which do you "design for"?

> In the May issue of Digital Output, an article titled Designing the User
> Experience,  writers Ralph Kimball and Richard Merz stress that you must
> design for the lowest common denominator - even to still consider the old
> 28.8 kps modems out there.

Agreed.  And there's even slower ones still being used.  Having said that,
people who run 14.4k modems will be USED to long waits, or they might be
surfing with images turned off.  My own aim is to keep total file size for any
page under 40K if at all possible.  Even at 14.4K that would "only" take
something like 30 seconds.

I have recently become the webmaster for my employer's site (in my "day job").
I am looking to re-design that site somewhat, partly because of the download
size.  The opening page has something like 200k (though what shows up
initially is somewhat less at "only" 98K).  The statistics server reports that
as many as 70% of visitors exit from that same page and spend less than 1
minute on the site.  When I say exit, I mean to a different site, not to a
different page (there are no external links on the opening page).   See
www.dasfleet.com.au

Now that could of course be due to many factors (including it not being what
they were looking for), but I do think the download size may have something to
do with it: 200k on a 56k connection is still (under ideal circumstances) a
wait in the order of half a minute or more.

My own sites don't take that long to load because I keep the files small:
about 15K for one site and about 36K for the other (which is not quite
complete yet), not including mouseover images whiech load when the rest of the
page has been displayed.

Having said that, I just went to the second one and it took about a minute to
load!  Congestion on my ISP's overloaded servers I guess....

Regards
--
Bert Doorn, Web Developer
http://www.BetterWebDesign.com.au/
and http://www.bwdzine.com/

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