Dicks.
| "The average Internet user has a large monitor and no time to waste on itty bitty layouts and imagery. Think bigger, design wider and extend your customer reach." |
All of you, with your big damned monitors. You’re all dicks and I hate you. The biggest screen I own is 17 inches and I’m perfectly happy with it until I start reading the blogs or kill a little time at the electronics store. It never fails. The moment I see one of those massive monitors, its screen glowing with a clarity I’ve never known, I feel hopelessly inadequate. 20 inches. 25 inches. 37 inches... when will it stop? I’ll tell you when. Probably never. You bastards won’t be satisfied until your homes come equipped with wall-sized monitors. You are all assholes and I hope you monitors break in a millions little pieces of FAIL.
Okay. I don’t really hate you. Being a woman, I’m not very good at this whole "size" thing and no doubt, come off sounding like well, a woman. The fact is I’m not that desperate for a bigger monitor. If someone were to just give me one, I would absolutely take it and hook it right up but that won’t be happening and I’m fine with that. The thing is, at 1024x768 max, I am in the minority when it comes to average screen resolution.
According to W3Schools, 57% of surfers are looking at the web with resolutions higher than 1024x768. In other words, the pages I make look fine on my screen but on other people’s bigger screens my graphics look tiny, my fonts are too small and my tables and/or div boxes appear bunched up. I might be missing out but the users that come to my site should have to suffer.
In the old days, webmasters with bigger screens used to get yelled at because they built their pages to look good on their monitors and neglected to compensate for the majority of regular folk, forced to side-scroll because of 800x600 screens. Things have changed. Today, I would rather side-scroll pages on my smaller monitor than risk losing visitors to uncomfortable squinting.
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Bigger is better but it’s not just about screen resolution.
While there’s no doubt that the Web 2.0 thing is overplayed, when it comes to design, 21st century surfers dig it when their fonts are a little larger and their pages a little wider. Internet users have been staring at monitors for more than ten years and they’re demanding pages that take up more screen. There’s a certain claustrophobic effect to a cramped design. When your page is squished up your potential customers start to feel trapped. They will click their back buttons faster than you can say "endless horizon". Furthermore, along with bigger fonts and div boxes people expect more open space on the page. If you want to insure that your designs line up properly, it’s time to let go of fixed-width layouts and start making them fluid.
Let’s not forget bigger in reference to bandwidth. While you should absolutely optimize images and video in order to save on your transfer fees, more surfers are on broadband connections than dial-up. The time of slow-loading graphics and streams is over. You don’t need to make teeny thumbnails anymore. You don’t have to worry that your full-sized pics are bigger than 50 kilobytes. Considering that 99% of your visitors have the Flash plugin installed, you can feel free to serve them clean, clear clips via an embedded player with a decent-sized window. The visual stuff can take up more footprint and the files can be larger. As long as you optimize, compress with your paid bandwidth in mind, then your load-times should take care of themselves.
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Look. I didn’t mean it. You’re not dicks. I don’t hate big monitor people. I was just trying to be clever with the whole "size" thing. Just because I have a wee screen, it doesn’t mean I don’t know what’s up with the rest of the world. I know you fellows out there don’t believe us ladies when we say that penis size doesn’t matter but believe this old Titmowse when I tell you that for adult webmasters, size matters a lot. The average Internet user has a large monitor and no time to waste on itty bitty layouts and imagery. Think bigger, design wider and extend your customer reach.