Web designers and developers have long struggled with having to design for many different devices, browsers and screen resolutions. A one-size-fits-all approach is one that many developers opt for (primarily because it’s easier to code) but which size is best?

According to W3Schools, a staggering 99% of visitors to their site are using a screen resolution of 1024×768 or higher. One can’t take this as a definitive percentage of all screen resolutions across the Internet because the W3Schools site targets a particular demographic – namely those interested in web trends and analysis, but the figure is still very high all the same.

Another site which perhaps gives us a more accurate figure is StatCounter, a Visitor Analysis package that webmasters can install to track visitor activity to their website. The package is very similar to the ubiquitous Google Analytics software, but differs in one important detail; StatCounter provide global statistics reports where trends can be tracked over a period of time.  The reports are assembled from over 15 billion global hits to more than 3 million websites covering a multitude of interests, so we can be sure these figures are likely to be closer to the mark.

From the report above we can see that 1024×768 and higher resolutions account for the vast majority of screen sizes. Assuming the dotted line represents some of the smaller sizes, we can determine that the percentage of 1024 and above to be somewhere in the region of 84%. Not as high as 99%, but exceptionally high nonetheless.

If current trends continue the figure is only going to get higher, so what does that mean for us designers and developers? Surprisingly, not a lot! Let us apply those figures to a real world example.

If you code your pages to a fixed width, say 960px which appears to be a very popular size in the developer community, you know for sure that at least 84% of your visitors are going to see the site exactly as you intended. Great! But what about the other 16%? If your site averages over 1000 visitors a month, you are alienating 160 of those people by forcing them to scroll horizontally in order to use your site. Horizontal scrolling is one of the few things guaranteed to annoy visitors of any website, so the width of your site is still as important today as it has always been. With the rise of Internet use on the increase in the developing world, it is likely to remain an issue for a long time to come.

If you’re not already, you should be looking at incorporating responsive design in your websites in order to make your visitor experience a good one for everybody, not just the majority!

Check out Web Designer Wall’s excellent Responsive Design in 3 Steps to get started.