Cater to the masses
One of the most important aspects of launching your business on the web is taking into consideration how your website will look to your visitors. It can be easy to forget that your clients may not be looking at your website at the same resolution, monitor size, browser and speed that you are.
Although it may be tempting to have your site look the best on a 20″ Widescreen LCD monitor at a 1280×720 screen resolution, it is crucial to remember that only a small percentage of your visitors will be seeing what you’re seeing.
Statistics show that roughly 57% of Internet users are browsing at a 1024×768 screen resolution. What can be frustrating about this is that there are still almost 20% of users still browsing at 800×600, so it can be difficult accommodating both user groups while maintaining the most attractive layout for your site.
If a fixed-width layout (which, IMHO usually make the most attractive/modern looking designs) is set too wide, an 800×600 user will get horizontal scrollbars. However, trying to accommodate those 800×600 folks can leave a lot of empty whitespace on higher resolutions.
Then there are differences in browsers. Internet Explorer commands a bit over 50% of the market, with Firefox coming in 2nd with almost 28% right now. Although the new IE7 is much more web standards compliant - the fact still remains that different browsers will render your site differently. The better the site is coded, the less drastic those differences will be. Even so, if you compare your site in IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari and any other browser, you’re almost sure to notice slight-to-major differences in spacing, layout, fonts or more.
And finally, there is speed.
With the availability of broadband these days, it can seem amazing that over 20% of users are still on a dial-up connection (heheh…maybe they’re also the ones with their monitors set to 800×600). Because appearances are very important with the adult entertainment websites, it usually isn’t an option for you to skimp on photos or graphics. You need your site to look great…so unless your specifically going for a utilitarian look….it is perfect acceptable to be liberal with your design & photos.
Even so, you need to be conscientious of not doing things like loading a 3 MB music file in the background while people are trying to use your site (background music is always a bad idea in general anyways). And you should *always* optimize or compress your photos for the web before uploading them to your site. Fresh off a digital camera…a single photo can be anywhere from 1-10 MB (megabytes) in size. You can easily get the size down to a fraction of that by optimizing with a photo editing program.
Ultimately, there are limitations to how much you can do about making your site look universally similar on every computer. But understanding and taking into consideration that these differences exist will help you be more realistic about what you should or shouldn’t do with a website. A good rule of thumb is to make your site look the very best for the majority of users but understand that you also need to make sure it is still attractive and usable for those in the minority.
