Designing by Numbers — Statistics and No Lies!

Stats tell us a myriad of things, some even useful and we’reaccustomed to using them in our marketing and selling processes.Frequently abused and made to say what WE want, but here I ammerely considering them in ways that influence site design …and, I believe, letting the numbers speak for themselves.

Before finalising my own choices for the recent (and always inprogress) re-design at http://www.tucats-design.com I had a lookat my stats and at various global statistical information online.

For this exercise, I took a glance at the overall picture viathe third-party service I use from http://www.thecounter.com –all my pages have their invisible option installed. Raw logstats will tell you a whole lot more, but this serves thepurpose.

OK, I’m lazy and I like getting their weekly report by email.

The information (percentages) for my site are those used for theanalysis below. The global stats I consulted didn’t show anyfundamental differences from these findings, i.e. they shouldapply to you too unless your site only caters to some specificgroup that is far and away from the average.

Resolution:

Unknown (2%) 640×480 (9%) 800×600 (61%) 1024×768 (23%) 1152×864(1%) 1280×1024 (1%) 1600×1200 (0%)

It wasn’t that long ago that there was a case for making sitesat a fixed 600 pixel width to fit the 640 x 480 resolution. Forsingle-product sales letters, I think there is still a case. Itlooks better than having lines stretch across too wide a portionof the screen, even if the visitor does have 1024 x 768.

If you have more content to link to, you need space for menusand stuff. Is it safe to use a bit more screen real estate? Itake my lead from Boogie Jack – http://boogiejack.com — in thatwhen a group drops below 10%, then it is safe to stop labouringtoo hard to make things absolutely and perfectly compatible.

The percentages above too are taken from cumulative data — thatis those built over time. What they don’t show is that the 9%using 640 x 480 could have visited months ago. I certainly knowthat percentage has been dropping as time has passed.

So, to fit in with the now most common 800 x 600 resolution, Iam using a fixed width of 750 pixels for the tables that formthe basis for my design. Now it’s true that you could justdesign in 100% widths so that it will adapt to everything, butit is just so much harder to do, especially if you want to usetables with multiple columns. The chances are high that you’llput some image somewhere which mucks it up. Been there!

As you can see, 1024 x 768 has now jumped up into second place(I use that resolution myself) at a pretty meaningful 23%. Yet Isee sites every day that look absolutely awful at thatresolution because they were designed for smaller sizes, butusing 100% width tables. You really need to consider this groupnow.

However, it is easy to test and easy to change your resolution.For the vast majority of you using Windows 98. Simply Rightclick on any blank portion of your desktop and select”Properties” from the popup menu. From there, select theSettings tab.

You’ll see a slider control in the bottom-right of that window,which will probably go from 640 x 480 to 800 x 600 and 1024 x768 on the right. Choose any option and you’ll have 15 secondsto “test” after which the machine will restore automatically toyour previous settings, unless you tell it otherwise.

Another way is to get SilverThingy from Sausage Software “TestWeb pages in a number of screen configurations. Using eitherInternet Explorer or Netscape you are able to preview your Webpages in the three popular screen resolutions (640 by 480, 800by 600, 1024 by 768). This allows you to make certain your Webpages will look great on everyone’s screens regardless of theirsettings!”http://www.sausage.com/supertoolz/web_utilities/stsilverthingy.ht ml

Browsers:

MSIE 5.x (70%) Netscape 4.x (14%) MSIE 4.x (9%) Netscape comp.(2%) MSIE 2.x (1%) Opera x.x (0%) MSIE 3.x (0%) Unknown (0%)Netscape 3.x (0%) Mozilla 5.x (0%) Netscape 2.x (0%) Netscape1.x (0%)

The days of having to be absolutely pedantic about”cross-browser compatibility” are gone.

With a total of 79% of visitors able to see most or all of theextra goodies that you can do, particularly with CSS, in IE 4