One of the mistakes I’ve made on this blog is not paying attention to the screen resolution used by visitors. Have you ever tried viewing your web site at different screen resolutions? You might be surprised at the results, especially if you use a fluid width theme like I do.
Not paying attention to screen resolutions is an easy mistake. If your website displays poorly at other resolutions you could be losing out on valuable traffic. First impressions count so don’t make the same mistake as me.
My PC at home uses a screen resolution of 1280×1024 and this blog displays fine at that resolution. Last week I visited my web site from a friend’s PC who uses 1024×768. I noticed that my blog didn’t display well at that resolution. Since I was using a fluid width theme I noticed the main body of each post was too narrow to read properly.
I had a look in Google Analytics and noticed the majority of visitors to this site use 1024×768. Not good news.
Assuming you use Google Analytics, you can discover what resolutions your visitors are using by accessing the Screen Resolutions option from the Visitors tab.
I wonder how many of those 5000 visitors were turned off due to my web site not displaying properly. Quite a few I imagine. This represented a lost opportunity to gain new readers.
So what have I done to fix this? I’ve started using a fixed width theme for starters. I’ve found this works better across a greater variety of screen resolutions, especially for web sites that use a lot of images like some of my articles do. There are more design improvements coming to this web site very soon so watch this space!
I recommend you try viewing your own web site at different resolutions. It could be time well spent if you spot some mistakes.