Well, it seems the answer is yes.
I’ve spent a few minutes over lunch checking out my website stats, something I try to avoid most of the time for fear of becoming obsessive. Some things that stood out were:
- The country with the biggest hit-rate is the USA, with about twice as many hits as India in second place. This was quite a surprise because when I’ve checked in the past I’ve typically had more hits from Asia than the US.
- As far as the US is concerned, I’ve got hits from all the states, but most come from California. At equal second come Texas and New York.
- I don’t have any visits at all this month from Turkmenistan, Somalia, French Guiana, North Korea, Central African Republic, Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leon, Western Sahara or Chad. If you can hear me, I only want one click. 🙂
- IE has 63% of the browser market, with Firefox (go on boys!) on 33%. The rest are fighting over scraps.
- Google is the only search engine. I seem to remember hearing somewhere that there were others, but I for one can’t remember what their names are, and it seems like you guys can’t either!
I’ve got to stop looking at them now or I’ll get all weird about trying to spread the word in Africa… 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
Update:
Based on John Scott’s comment, I checked the screen resolutions. Approximately 2.5% of visits were done with a resolution of 800×600. Who’d a thunk it! 🙂
Most are between 1024×768 and 1280×1024, with a few, including me, on 1920×1200…
Another interesting stat to look at is the average browser resolution, I still occasionally hear from people who say they *must* target 800×600 resolution because it’s the lowest common denominator (I personally haven’t seen that for years now).
I’ve updated the post with that info. 🙂
I guess as IT people, we don’t constitute normal users. If this were a site about a non-IT subject the numbers might be very different.
Cheers
Tim…
I like to have my resolution set at 1024×768 (since I use a laptop and don’t like to strain my eyes looking at tiny graphics). Also I don’t like to read the interwebs with my browser maximized. So I personally still prefer sites to be designed for 800×600 because that’s the size of my browser window. But hey I also like linux and Oracle so I’m probably not representative of the ordinary Joe who browses the net… 🙂
what sort of mad fool would focus on African visitors eh?
I’d say 1024 was a decent design size, though to be honest good css (not my site admittedly) should deal with varying browser resolutions.
Niall,
I agree that sites should cope with varying browser resolutions, but not with 800×600 as a minimum because that can severely limit how you design your site. I think these days 1024×768 is a pretty decent screen resolution to cater for (obviously the browser window size can be less than that).
John.
I guess your take on this depends greatly on the audience for your material. I publish technical stuff on my site so I expect people to have a reasonable resolution. I publish gibberish on my blog, so I doubt resolution matters. 🙂
If I were trying to appeal to the mass market I would probably do what everyone else does and used fixed size pages centered on the screen. You only need to take a quick look at the social networking sites to see that they still work very well on 800×600. Your audience dictates you resolution.
Cheers
Tim…
hmmmmm, if you get a few from Sydney on 1280 and then on 1920, that’ll be me:
got a big screen at work and a normal 19″ (cripes, a coupla years ago that was BIG!)
at home: both used regularly to go through the blogs!
So you’re the person fro Sydney… 🙂 Just kidding. There’s more than one… Two actually. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…