Into the Future of Website Pixel Trends

Statistics are important data to business industries. However, statistics regarding browser display and the trend of advancing forward are important concepts to web designers and developers. As computer technology advances, the size of monitor screen is increasing; thus resulting in technology companies designing and developing sites at a wider scale. However, this opposes a problem for the general public, especially businesses and individuals who are still utilizing smaller monitor resolutions or viewing sites at the ancient resolution of 800x600 pixels.

One of the issues that concern many web designers and web developers is the screen size and/or resolution. We often debate over the dimension of the websites and the questions of "Is there an industry standard or are we following some kind of trend? How are we going to assure our clients and the public the affordability of wider screen pixel and higher resolution as technology advances?"

The overall site width varies from site to site depending on personal preferences and our customers' needs. As a rule of thumb, the most common site width hangs around 800 to 850 pixels. Some sites are expanding up to the 950 or even 1000 pixels wide. The wider the monitor size, the more opportunities web designers and developers have to play with, which usually leads to designing wider sites. As website pixel trends increase in size, technology industries need to keep the public's interests in mind when designing wider sites. One, technology industries need to analyze and take into consideration whether our customers and/or the general public are still holding onto smaller screens. Two, how we accommodate wider sites with smaller screen size? Three, can everyone afford to have widescreen monitors which can easily display sites that are designed and developed to be wide. And four, is there a way for technology industries to monitor what each end users are applying in keeping the width around the standard 800 pixels wide?

In conclusion, 800x600 will become extinct! 1024x768 will be the norm which will slowly fade out, and resolution higher than 1024x768 will be the trendsetter!

Here are some stats from two websites which I found interesting in supporting the screen resolution stats:

W3Schools.com (source: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp) 800x600 pixel was widely used in January 2000 with 56% and as of January 2009, it has dropped to 4% with the biggest dip between January 2005 and January 2006 with a 10% decrease.

Back in January 2009, 36% were using1024x768 with the most popular years in 2006, which has continued to slowly decrease while higher screen resolution saw a significant increase from January 2008 to January 2009 and trends are showing that it's on a increase as we progress throughout the year.

Using W3Counter Global Web Stats (url: http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php), it shows that 1024x768 came in around 40% with each month dropping .50% giving the month of May with 38.52%. As this slowly decrease, higher screen resolution make a slight increase.