Latest Comment...

Sideways scrolling is way more of a pain than vertical scrolling.

I think we website looks great.

Well done on all the changes!

Original Post: ArtWanted.com Website Resolution

A few comments have come up about the design resolution of our new site. We thought it would be good to make a post that talks specifically about this issue...

As we went over the early mock-ups of the new ArtWanted.com, one big question was...What resolution do we design the site for? Before answering this question, we did a lot of research. We went through detailed analysis of our website analytics of our users computers, we read many posts/websites from design experts and we looked at what the other large companies were doing.

Our research told us that 95% of our users have a monitor resolution of at least 1024x768 pixels or higher and that percentage continues to grow every month. We also looked at major websites like adobe.com, apple.com, myspace.com, youtube.com, cnn.com and ebay.com - Every one of these websites has designed their website for 1024x768 monitor resolution and will look bad (or require additional scrolling) at a lower resolution. Because of our research, and the vast majority of the major websites designing for this resolution, we decided to design our new site for the 1024x768 pixel world.

While this larger screen requirement would make additional side-to-side scrolling for 5% of our users, it gives a much better experience and use of screen space for 95% of our users. We wanted to take advantage of the larger area of the vast majority of our members, instead of forcing most of our members to have lots of white/dead space on their monitor when looking at our site. For 95% of our users, they can now see more images and text on the screen without scrolling, than they did before with our old design.

For example, with a monitor resolution of 1024x768, our users could only see 6 image thumbnails on the old site (without scrolling) when doing a basic image search. Now these same users can see 8 thumbnail images on our search pages without scrolling. Other pages on our site allow for even more images on the screen with our new site design. There is even less scrolling on our message boards for the majority of our members, because we can now display text in an 700 pixel wide area, instead of 500 pixels. This makes the text comments wider and take up less space vertically. Result: less scrolling on the message boards as well. In fact, with most areas of our site, there is less scrolling because of this better use of space than our old site for the majority of our members.

And now...a message to those users still on a lower 800x600 pixel resolution screen. We want you to know that we did not forget about you with our website changes. We were very mindful of your smaller screen size and our site was designed to still look good with a lower resolution. You will notice that we have a consistent layout of a small column on the left, and a larger 'content area' on the right. This 'content area' fits perfectly on a 800x600 resolution monitor, where you can view all of the images and read the text in the content area without scrolling side-to-side like you have to do with other sites (ie adobe.com, apple.com, myspace.com, etc.). This was done on purpose and not by accident. This allows you to read long message board threads and browse image results without scrolling side-to-side to view the entire content. You will see everything you need and only need to scroll down like any other computer to view the longer posts/image results.

The end result of our new design allows the majority of our users to have a better experience using our site, but still allows for a good experience for the 800x600 resolution users...far better than the majority of other websites out there.

We hope this thread explains the reasons for our change and everyone can now see why we made this upgrade to our site. Thanks!