Over the last few months I’ve been asked the same question many times, each time I start designing a new website: “Should we design it for 800 x 600 resolution or we can go for 1024 x 768 ?”

Until last year I would always suggest, “Let’s do it on 800 x 600 because half of the users still have this resolution on their computers.” But fortunately the internet has changed a lot since then, and the monitors are bigger, so the computers come with 1024 resolution as default. GREAT.

As we are an online marketing agency specialising in the travel industry, we love to make our clients’ sites sparkle and stand out from the others. Designing for bigger resolutions means bigger pictures, bigger fonts, more information, more space, and more freshness and organization on the page.

1024×768 screen resolution is used by 36% of internet users worldwide, and in fact 57% use even higher screen resolutions. The 800×600 is used by only 4% of the users.

Some people from other agencies still think that 800 x 600 is the right resolution to go for. It’s definitely a matter of who is going to be navigating on your site. It could be that your target market is somewhere in the world where they don’t have high spec computers or big screens, and still use a dial up connection. In that case, yes, go for 800 x 600, but they are the minority of users (8%).

I think that when it comes to 1024px resolution, we can enhance the user experience on the website, adding more to the page where we couldn’t before, because we didn’t have enough space.

Conclusion

1024 px resolution has changed the way of design for the better, as we now can use the “extra” space to do “extra” things for our clients and their customers.

GO BIGGER !