[thelist] Most common screen resolution?

[aardvark]

> From: "Janet Green" <JGreen at desmoinesmetro.com>
[...]
> 1. Does anyone have a web statistics site they like to visit to find
> out what the most commonly used screen resolution is these days for
> average web surfers, or failing that, do you have an opinion about how
> likely people are to be viewing at 1024x?

i'm a big fan of doing my own research and eschewing what the
'big' sites say is the norm... i have many projects/clients where
their numbers do not conform to the averages, and building to the
averages would be a disservice (or disaster)...

that being said, i went so far as to not only write a tutorial showing
how to find these numbers for your own audience, but offered up
mine for comparison:

Real-World Browser Size Stats, Part I
http://evolt.org/article/list/17/2295/

Real-World Browser Size Stats, Part II
http://www.evolt.org/article/list/20/2297/

(and yes, that is a PowerPuff Girls light string i'm holding, and yes,
that is a new scarf i am wearing -- it's an xmas photo)

> 2. How likely are people to
> change their screen resolution because a particular website says it's
> "best viewed at" (x)?

IME, not at all likely... the average user at most of our client sites
(cancer site, city site, law firm, etc.) wouldn't know how to... the
average user at some of our more cutting edge sites (photographer,
arts org, tech site) generally wouldn't because they "knew better"
than us (testing revealed that)...  in all those cases, that's why i
went liquid...

> 3. How likely they are to change all their
> Windows settings to customize their computer? (I consider myself an
> above average computer user, but I NEVER mess with the Windows
> type-size settings. Maybe I'm not so above average after all!!)
[...]

when it comes to type resolution, not terribly likely, except for flat-
panel display users and users on laptops... not that they *change*
them or fiddle, but that factory defaults are often not the same as a
system with a CRT...  here comes another article pimp...

i wrote the article below for a journal that focuses on the flat panel
and LCD market... they have readers who are increasingly running
into sites that are unusable for them, and the editor sent a couple
my way to see if i could help... ultimately, the problem was that
developers didn't account for different type sizes or screen
resolutions in their implementation:

The Wrong Way to Use CSS in Page Layouts
http://evolt.org/article/list/20/22547/