[Sigia-l] 800 or 1024 - Which min. display resolution to buil d for?

[John McCrory]

I'm currently engaged in some long-overdue cosmetic revisions to my
organization's web site, and I had a similar question. I wanted to get a
general idea of how much real estate I had to work with, regardless of
whether we pursue a liquid layout or some other approach. 

I didn't want to rely on other people's rules of thumb because our site's
audience is distinct from that of the consumer-oriented sites those rules of
thumb usually come from. Our audience is mainly people in government,
academe, and the nonprofit sector. I also noticed that most of the data out
there was on screen resolution, not viewport size, and (as pointed out
earlier in this thread) it's the viewport size that matters.

Beginning in April, I began collecting that data from visitors to our site
via a javascript image bug. The script accounted for different browser
flavors, and measured the width and height of the viewport and the width and
height of the screen. (Historically, about 99.7% of human visitors to our
site have javascript on, so I decided this was a reliable approach.)
Coincidental to this thread's appearance, I began evaluating the data
yesterday. What I found for our site has limited usefulness, but since there
is so little data easily available on viewport sizes, I thought some of you
might find it of interest.

Here's my first basic results:

   99% of visitors had viewports set wider than 569 pixels.
   95% of visitors had viewports set wider than 732 pixels.
   90% of visitors had viewports set wider than 766 pixels.
   75% of visitors had viewports set wider than 778 pixels.
   50% of visitors had viewports set wider than 991 pixels.
   25% of visitors had viewports set wider than 1003 pixels.
    1% of visitors had viewports set wider than 1397 pixels.

The breakpoints in the width data seem to be around 778 and 1003 pixels.

   99% of visitors had viewports set taller than 268 pixels.
   95% of visitors had viewports set taller than 380 pixels.
   90% of visitors had viewports set taller than 403 pixels.
   75% of visitors had viewports set taller than 433 pixels.
   50% of visitors had viewports set taller than 571 pixels.
   25% of visitors had viewports set taller than 604 pixels.
    1% of visitors had viewports set taller than 887 pixels.

I was actually surprised at how short many visitors' viewports were. To make
sure something is "above the fold" on our pages for 95% of visitors (my
chosen target), it will need to be in the top 5 inches.

If you want to know more, feel free to play with my sample data. You can
download it from my personal web site:

   http://www.johnmccrory.com/miscfiles/visitor_viewport_data_sample.txt

I haven't had time to crunch it much, yet. You might find out things I
didn't bother to look at. This sample is taken from nearly 7000 visits
during the months of March and April of this year (or about 8% of our site's
visitor traffic in the period). It is in a tab-delimited text file. The
columns are: 

    visit_id | user-agent | viewport-width | viewport-height | screen-width
| screen-height


     John McCrory
     Webmaster
     Vera Institute of Justice
     233 Broadway
     New York, NY 10279
     www.vera.org
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