I almost focused this post exclusively on blogs an put it in the category for that, but this applies to anyone who has, makes, works on, or is considering building web pages of any sort. When you are creating any sort of web page (including blog templates) you need to keep in mind the screen resolution of your monitor.

The biggest issue with this is not in the height, but rather the width of the screen. Many people who do web development type stuff and are moderately technology savvy use fairly large screen resolutions compared to the average home user that checks email and watches videos on YouTube.

For example, I tend to do most of my blogging on a 1280×1024 screen resolution and there are others that use resolutions that make mine seem tiny. However, most Windows users and others who don’t spend hours in front of their monitor use 1024×768. Also, there are situations where I find myself working on monitors with 1024×768 resolution and I don’t change it (for a variety of reasons).

While this is not important for most applications, it is extremely important in the realm of web development. One thing that can instantly detract from the professionalism of a website is if the user has to scroll side-to-side to see all of the content. Any web developer who wants to maintain a professional looking website needs to keep this in mind and make sure that the layout they are using works on the greatest combination of system settings possible while still maintaining the user experience.

In the past, common screen resolutions have been as low as 800×600, but due to the low number of people with that small of resolution today, it would be counter-productive to tailor pages for screens that small.

A quick look at my stats in Analytics shows that while most of my viewers use larger screen sizes, 26.74% of them use 1024×768 and only 2.32% use 800×600. For this reason, I feel it is necessary to make sure that my site is optimized to comfortably fit on a 1024×768 resolution. By doing this I am accommodating over 95% of my viewers rather than the approximately 70% I would be accommodating by optimizing for a larger screen size. While 95% is not perfect, as the saying goes, you can’t please everybody.

The reason I almost put this under Blogs and Blogging is because most of the offenders of this rule that I see are blogs. The loading of these pages on screens too small usually has one of two undesirable effects that really take away from the experience of the site. Either the site loads properly and the user has to scroll side-to-side to see everything or the sidebars load underneath the main content which looks quite awkward and is not as user-friendly as having them where they belong.