

Browser Size, from Google Labs - wglb
http://www.googlelabs.com/show_details?app_key=agtnbGFiczIwLXd3d3IVCxIMTGFic0FwcE1vZGVsGPv7gAEM

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wyday
Kinda cool, but it doesn't work well if you have a widescreen monitor with the
browser full screen & your site is center aligned.

It seems to only work if you left align all your content.

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chaosmachine
You can work around this by resizing your browser to the width you want to
test at.

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wyday
Right, but at that point you're just doing all the work a browser extension
can do for you.

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eli
Not really, you just need to resize it to the minimum width of your site. It's
easy to see.

Presumably you (the developer) have a screen much wider than your site.

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josefresco
This is bad and I'll tell you why. If you do client work (ie build websites
for business owners) they will occasionally get obsessed with cramming all of
their content 'above-the-fold'. They key distinction is that instead of
logically placing _important_ things above the fold (and still keeping the
rest), they want EVERYTHING above the fold which leads to huge compromises in
design, layout and functionality.

I would love to share this data with clients but I'm not looking forward to
the resulting fallout.

Anyone know of a good way to handle the client who demands their entire
website be ATF?

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gbelote
One (arguably important) unknown here is how likely is a 640x480 user to
scroll the page vs a 800x600 user.

You can point out to your client that a more real quality is user engagement
-- it's not enough to just show content. This is affected by ATF, but a
newpaper-like design of cramming content together may not be the best
approach.

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gaborcselle
I don't understand why the size lines aren't straight?

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nixme
They're picking the lines at "nice" percentages, so the lines won't
necessarily be straight (different widescreen ratios, etc. get combined)

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timdorr
Easiest way to think of it: consider the position of the bottom right corner.
It can be put in any position with a resize, so the line doesn't have to be
straight.

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dryicerx
And a bunch of people with a higher than 1400px width monitors see the overlay
image... all over again.

Not to mention, it totally screws up with centered content.

And the mentioned irregular lines that look like it was drawn in Paint.

Disappointing...

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83457
Would be useful to know who has a mouse wheel. That definitely makes a
significant difference in my perception of "the fold" when there is almost no
effort involved in scrolling down.

The donation button for example would be seen by me almost 100% of the time
even if off the page because scrolling down maybe 50% of the height of the
window is just habit when I come to a new page to throw the heading off the
top and only show the content.

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NathanKP
I've always designed my sites to be about 1000 pixels wide so almost every
computer user can see everything across the site in the horizontal direction.
What is more interesting is seeing how much of the screen can be seen in the
vertical direction.

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ugh
But you should also consider that not everyone is surfing full screen. Sure,
the screen may be 1000 pixel wide, but the browser may only be 500 pixel wide.

For me this doesn’t mean that you should cram everything into something 500
pixel wide or less – sites that are 1000 pixel wide are fine. It’s just that
sites shouldn’t break if you shrink the browser window (mind the margins) and
the content part of the site (body text, videos, images) shouldn’t be much
wider than 500 pixel. All the navigational stuff doesn’t have to be visible
all the time, but the site should remain usable. (Since there shouldn’t be
many more than 100 or so characters per line, having text no more than 500
pixel wide is certainly appropriate.)

(Luckily horizontal scrolling is a breeze on any current Mac which also happen
to be running the OS on which running a browser not full screen is pretty
likely.)

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NathanKP
I totally agree with you. I always test layouts to make sure that they don't
break when the browser window is less than 1000 pixels wide.

I use a Mac so horizontal scrolling is easy. Still I try to avoid it in my
sites since most of my target audience uses Windows or other OS's.

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makmanalp
Pages that are centered and expand horizontally to fit don't work well with
this. Eg: google web page. Apparently not everyone can see all of the search
bar when I maximize but when I make the window smaller almost everyone can.

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thaumaturgy
Now that everything has died down ...

This seems to be a good spot to quietly mention a project I worked on for a
client recently. It's the standard photo gallery fare, etc. -- but their
primary complaint was that it didn't look right at different screen
resolutions.

I integrated two different frameworks I've built and developed a website that
always adjusts to the user's browser window size. Check it out!
<http://messersmith-homes.com/landhomes/bigoak>

I'm currently quietly adding features and polish to the two frameworks
involved.

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johnl
Good analysis. I think they should qualify it by content. A non-ad-driven site
like "donate" should have the button on the top and the supporting argument
below. A ad-driven site like the file sharing sites should have the button on
the bottom so ads are at least scanned on your way to ther bottom.

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brown9-2
I wonder how long it will be before they offer this data with stats specific
to your site (via Analytics). I'm curious how widely this data varies based on
user population.

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rubyrescue
the example implies that a donate button below the fold is a big barrier to
conversion but recent studies seem to indicate it is not - certainly not worth
designing for <750x300.

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spazmaster
could you provide links to those studies? thanks!

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jister
Like it! Great tool for testing UI and scrollbars.

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dmix
This seems to be a very poor substitute for a VM + changing the display
settings. Includes tiny resolutions, difficult to read and doesn't work with
local copies.

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jonknee
To be fair, this does combine in stats (X% of users...)

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whatusername
Not just that - Google.com stats.. They would have to be some of the most
valuable stats in terms of getting an unbiased sample of the general
population.

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mwexler
Well, yes and no. Unclear what countries, languages, etc. they are including
in here. Your site's audience may in fact not represent the general
population, so you could be optimizing for the wrong group.

It would be helpful to be able to see these %age borders for just US surfers,
for example, or from US daytime usage vs. nightime, or even IPs resolving to
corporate vs. non corporate (poor attempt at separating at work from at home
usage). This way you could optimize for your intended audience instead of the
general populace, few of whom might be your paying customers.

