Taking a look at the blog this morning brought a smile on my face, since the counter dinged exactly 160,000 visitors. After the launch of Bright Side of News, time just flew by. I will be using this blog for several experiments from now on…
Recently, I met with a friend of mine and we had an interesting discussion regarding decisions a person has to take when designing a website. Just like the paper magazine, there are numerous considerations to take… in this case we decided to go with 1050 pixel wide resolution because we felt it is the right resolution to go for the world of today, where most users use widescreen displays and large resolutions.
His case in point was valid: numerous netbooks feature a resolution of 1024×600 and those users will be left behind… technically, that was true, but the design offered way to reduce the size by one notch. But basic design had to stay above the 1000-pixel wide. Second point, about numerous users using 800×600 was… inaccurate, to say the least. While making our design call, we all followed stats such as Steam Hardware Survey, and numbers there were clear.
Looking back at these three weeks, our stats show that without any doubt, people moved on. These are the stats for our site for first three weeks, just as a preview to something that we are doing:
What is the profile of your average tech reader? One thing is sure - he uses a widescreen display.
As you can see, 83.2% [first 76.8%] of BSN* readers use a screen wider than 1050 pixels, 9.36% use sub-1050 resolution, and we have 7.41% that use alternative resolutions – not shown in this pie-chart, 3.17% use 800×600 pixel resolution, while the remainder goes to the Cellphone browsers such as iPhones and Blackberries.
But what was interesting was dominance of widescreen displays: just like Steam’s survey, more than 60% of all readers use a widescreen display. And Dell really sold a gazillion of those 24″ displays 
