Should You Redesign Your Site For Wider Screens?
By Anna Johnson on September 3rd, 2008Trust me, redesigning your website can be fun… but it can also be a pain. Typically the conceptualization bit is fun… but the fun has well and truly stopped by the time you’re double checking the date in your copyright notice on each webpage!
However, there is good reason to at least consider WIDENING your website. According to an article by Todd Follansbee, at least 75 to 80 percent of Internet users worldwide have a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 or larger. After taking into account the scroll bars and framework of a typical web browser, this translates into a width of 965 pixels. Which means that if your website has a width of anything less than that, you may be compromising both usability and click-throughs on your site.
Why? Because a narrower website means you need to push more content below the “fold” i.e. the invisible line under which a user must scroll in order to view more of your web content. The more you make web visitors scroll… the fewer the visitors who will actually stay, or take the most desired action, on your site.
So if you can widen your site and have more content above the fold, the longer visitors are likely to stay and do things on your site (like sign up to your list or buy your product).
That said, there are some important qualifications to expanding your site and sticking more content above the fold:
- It may not actually matter to your particular target market or in relation to your offer. If you have a long sales letter that people will need to scroll through anyway, increasing the width of your site may not really matter.
- It’s still optimal to limit the width of any block of text. According to Mr Follansbee, the optimal width is 55 characters per line. That may be too narrow for a sales letter website, but you certainly don’t want to have wide lines of text on your webpages.
All in all, consider your target market, the kind of website you have, and whether you have the time and resources to widen your website. But if you are planning to revamp your website anyway, it may be a good idea to increase its width.
September 3rd, 2008 at 6:58 am
Thanks Anna, for your interest in my article. Ralph always has limited space so I try to run the \"full\" article on my web site. All of my research is available free, no sign up required. Anyway the editted version did not include the fact that on my website for example the number of 800 X 600 users is now about 2%. The incentive to design wider is even great and the 25% figure really overestimates the number of 800 X 600 folks. Each site owner chan check their statistics to see for themselves.
Also The figure of 55 characters should not be a \"hard\" rule, more of a guideline.
Is it too commercial to suggest one other article which did not run in Web Marketing Today? I think it warrants some attention… Edit it if I am being inappropriate but I am not selling it. It describes the shortfalls of testing on traffic metrics such as Google Optimizer and the benefits of direct user video testing. (both are needed). It is also on my articles page, Why Video Testing is better. http://www.webmarketingresources.net/wmrarticles.html