Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates, Fourth Edition

Deciding on Resolution 53
which is usually a result of higher resolution monitors. Although there are workarounds,
people, by nature, don’t like change. This is only theory, though. Many
times it’s difficult to truly know where the Web world will end up.
The real question a designer needs to ask is ‘‘What is critical mass?’’ This ultimately
determines what the newer resolution should be designed for. This is a
call that, many times, a designer can leave to the client. Some people would say
75 percent of all users would be critical mass. Others might say 95 percent,
claiming that taking the risk of losing 25 percent of a user base is not worth the
benefit of going to a higher resolution. Making such a decision cannot be based
solely on general statistics. It should also be based on the type of audience a site is
geared toward. If the audience is high-tech, a site will likely be designed for the
highest acceptable resolution much sooner than if the site were geared toward a
more general audience, such as a search-engine site intended to satisfy the largest
audience possible. It is the job of the designer to know the statistics, understand
the implications of the various resolutions, and, if need be, make the call on the
resolution if the client ‘‘doesn’t care.’’
When going to a higher resolution, the designer must consider the quantity and
ratio of content. As resolution increases, so does the screen real estate. Jumping
from a resolution of 800 600 to 1024 768 increases the available screen area
by nearly 40 percent. When designing for a content-intensive page, this extra
space can be advantageous. The designer can either add more content or make
current content look less busy by reworking the layout.
This extra real estate is not as advantageous for a site with limited content. Sites
that have less content usually are supplemented with more graphics. Considering
that this can and probably will increase the download, it also increases the chance
of losing an impatient user. Also, do not assume that just because a user’s
monitor has a higher resolution that the user also has higher bandwidth. There
are users with 1024 768 resolution who still use 56K modems.
Designing for a higher resolution does not necessarily mean that the designer
need disregard monitors with lower resolutions. One trick that designers frequently
use is to design a site where the least important information is delegated
to a column to the right. That way, the most important information, which is on
the left, is still viewable by a user when the monitor is set to a lower resolution.
Figures 3.5 and 3.6 are screenshots of a site designed specifically for this issue.