April 1, 2006

Screen resolution and website viewing

Why you have to scroll right on some websites

You go to one website and you have to scroll to the right to read the whole page, you go to the next website and it's in the center with a lot of wasted space on either side. Sometimes the text is so tiny you can't read it and other times it looks perfect. Why is this you ask?

It's partly about screen resolution. Screen resolution is the size in pixels of your desktop. Most new computers are being shipped with a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels. Not too long ago they were being shipped with 800 x 600 pixels. It does't matter how large your monitor is, whether you have a 15" or 21" monitor, the quantity of pixels is the same. There is 1024 pixels going from left to right and 768 pixels going top to bottom. Picture an Excel spreadsheet with 10 columns and 7 rows. It doesn't matter how much you stretch the spreadsheet, there will still be 10 columns and 7 rows. If you have a 21" monitor the individual cells are bigger than if you have a 15" monitor, therefore it would be easier to read the text in the cell with the larger monitor. Make sense so far?

So what happens is a web designer makes a webpage that fits very nicely in a monitor with a screen of 1024 pixels wide but you show up with a screen that is only 800 pixels wide, you have to scroll to the right to see the additional 224 pixels. Ok, lets make the webpage fit into a 800 wide screen, so you won't have to scroll. Uh oh, now the person with the 1024 wide screen will have 224 pixels of white space. The page could be centered so that the white space is equal on both sides, or moved left and all the white space is on the right.

My next few posts will be about text on webpages, difficulties with making websites work with all browsers and some details on how my site is put together and what it does.

Life is Good

Wayne