In a design discussion I had with our new Web manager, Brent Schneider, a question was raised about the overall width of Eastern’s proposed new site design. The concern was that the proposed width of 980 pixels might be a little too wide. I must admit that in my own struggle to define a new layout and style for EWU’s Web presence (and, admittedly, in my utter hatred for the current site’s outdated 800×600 dimensional compliance) I neglected to consider the seemingly few individuals who might still prefer a skinny site. In a perfect world, we’d all have gloriously huge monitors, dual-monitors in fact… and of course we’d all be on Macs — or at least Linux (for Colin) — and the world would be a far better place. But I digress…
One good place to start in the search for something to back up the currently proposed width should be the Google Analytics data we’ve been collecting from Eastern’s new admissions-oriented microsite, startsomethingbig.org, which launched almost a year ago. The audience for this site is in many ways the same as the audience we want to aim Eastern’s redesigned site towards.
The screen resolution analytics collected shows us that the largest portion of our audience, nearly 30 percent, use a screen resolution of 1024×768. The redesigned site would show up fine at this resolution as long as the browser window is maximized. The only drawback would be that any side-background texture or imagery we use would not really be seen (which is usually built for those with larger monitors to take up some of that unused space anyway).
The second largest group (just over 20 percent) use a screen resolution of 1280×800, more than enough space to accommodate a 980 pixels-wide site with some bonus space left over for side-background imagery. The next most popular resolutions (1280×1024, 1680×1050, 1440×900, 1920×1200, 1280×768 etc.) account for more than 47.5 percent of our audience, all of which would beautifully display the newly redesigned site. This leaves us with less than 2.5 percent of our audience still using a screen resolution of 960×720, 800×600 or less.
Another good gauge for our audience and our industry’s take on this matter comes from looking at the widths of some other education sites, as well as some of the most popular and widely-used sites on the Web. Check out this nifty site width chart I created after looking at 17 other sites to see what they had already come up with. You’ll see that CWU is the most daring, with a homepage width of 1200 pixels. Both Virginia Tech and Amazon.com already use the same width we’re proposing, 980 pixels, while Facebook, Stanford, MySpace, Gonzaga, WSU and Appalachian all come in right around 960 pixels. (Maybe shaving off 10 pixels on each side of our layout would put us in a better range afterall.)
The rest (Biola, UW, Whitworth, CCS, our current site and WWU) all still appear to be trying to make the 2.5 percent happy. Fine for them, but I think our research shows that it’s going to be better to design to the future and get as much shelf life out of the new design as possible. That being said, there is a third option, an idea that comes from Yahoo!’s homepage that actually allows users to choose a more narrow layout if they prefer. Maybe this would be the best compromise for a site like ours that has to please so many people, but I’ll leave that little jewel up to Colin to figure out if it’s a CMS possibility. I did however just notice that Yahoo! seems to have a website redesign of their own in the works, and the new version eliminates the page width options. Oh well.
