Why is it that most blog themes are still rather narrow by modern display technology standards?
Very few of the fixed width themes I have looked at over the years have been wider than about 800 pixels. Yet when I use Woopra to look at the analytics of my sites, almost all of which are set to 1024px wide, very few visitors are set to a lower resolution. On my most visited site, the number of users with resolutions below 1024 is in the 3% range and about half of those are using phones from the resolutions reported.
It looks to me like if you are designing any layouts (other than mobile) less than 1024 pixels wide you are giving up screen apace to the user/readers desktop. While I am a big believer in white space, 200 plus pixels is taking white space to extremes. I realize many people manage this by using relative widths, but as a reader I have never found long lines of text easy to read.
Another thing I am seeing is that most visitors are still wedded to Microsoft for their browsing. Here is a pie chart of the numbers in the last month…
To my way of thinking, there are a number of things wrong with these numbers from a web publishing viewpoint…
- Internet Explorer in its many versions makes up close to 60% of the browser traffic to my sites. Design wise that can be a problem.
- Too many people are running old versions of software. Even after all of the talk online and in the newspapers almost thirty percent of folks visiting my site have not even updated their IE software…
- Firefox users seem to be more willing to upgrade based on the numbers.
- Google has some work to do if they want Chrome to have any kind of a presence in the browser market.
- Finally, not many of my visitors are Apple users. About 8.5% total Mac users. Which is trailing the market by about 2%.
All of the above stats are from the last month…It is always interesting to spend a little time viewing the numbers each month.
What are your stats telling you about your users?