This topic contains 4 replies, has 0 voices, and was last updated by 
-
Posts
-
Hi All,
I’d really like to know what size screen you are using to view the site. It would be very helpful if you could take a minute to let me know by voting in this poll.
You can vote more than once if you use several different screens.
If your exact screen resolution isn’t listed, please use the one with the closest horizontal resolution (eg for a 1280×900 pixel screen please use 1280×1024).
THANKS!!!
More info:
We’re doing a minor clean-up to the site design and it is time to revisit the basic page layout. It is always a pain to lay out web pages because so many people access the site with different systems. One of the major unknowns is what size your screen is, in particular the horizontal width. Everyone expects to scroll long web pages vertically, but it is horrible to have to scale them horizontally as well, so we try to design accordingly.When I did the original design for pages like the latest updates page, I made it so that people with 800×600 pixel screens could just about squeak in the whole thing horizontally in a maximized browser window. But the world has moved on, and it is now common to find horizontal resolutions up to 1600 pixels even on laptops, and on a big screen the pages can look pretty “windy” with a lot of wasted space. I put in the “floating” fade image to the right hand side of the page to help conterbalance this a bit, but at full-screen on a big widescreen display, it all looks a little lost. I want to tighten this up but don’t know how much space I have to play with.
You can vote up to five times, so if you read the site on several screens please vote accordingly. I’ve separated off mobile phones as although they have small screens they often do a very smart job of resampling them internally.
Cheers, Hywel.
I normally don’t maximize my browser, but I know people who do routinely run their browser maximized. (And some programs, e.g. photo viewers, I do always run maximized.)
That might be a good additional question to ask: How many RE members view RE with their browser maximized vs not maximized?
Hi Hywel,
Greetings from the eastern USA. My monitor screen will go to 1280 X 1024, which is what I voted for in the poll. However I typically do not run it at the maximum resolution. I normally run it at 1024 X 768. The primary reason for that is that I just don’t care for the small size the screen icons take on at the maximum resolution. The monitor screen is just under 14 inches wide and 11 inches high. Hard to say what I would do with a wider screen. At present I have zero interest in having web access, video on demand and so forth on my mobile phone so can’t really comment on resolution on that size screen. Just my two cetnts worth.
Cheers,
Jeff
Hi;
I guess another consideration (perhaps covered by Lurker and Jeffs posts in part) is how people view RE shoots. Personally I download them to my hard drive and view them later in Windows Picture and Fax viewer. Since this viewer adjusts larger images to fit into the viewable window I am not so worried about the pictures growing in either dimension (the Firefox web browser does a similar thing with pictures come to think of it). I guess you don’t want to make images unnecessarily wide if the majority of your subscribers are going to have to downsize them (either knowingly or as a function of the software they use to view the pictures) if only a minority will benefit from the change.
CD
Ps; Incidentally as we are talking about monitors and often discuss photography in these forums I have recently purchased a colorimeter that attaches to the front of my monitor and calibrates its rendition of colour. If you do any sort of photo manipulation on your computers or even just view a lot of graphics I can really recommend you get yourselves one. Turns out my monitor has been well out for a while but the human eye compensates really well for these changes and so it wasn’t until I got my Photoshopped images printed did I realise the colour casts I was actually adding to my files after they were taken – doh! (I got a Huey Pro btw)
Hi All,
Thanks for helpful feedback.
I also do not tend to run browser windows maximised, but I’m on a big screen and if the site wants it a little wider I can always widen my window a little.
My plan is to relax the constraints on “everything must work without horizontal scrolling on 800×600” for the navigational elements of the site, something which I think the resolution figures above support and which a lot of other sites seem to be doing around now. The site should still be absolutely viewable on 800×600, but some pages may require a bit of scrolling which they do not currently. I was only ever planning to back it off so everything fitted without horizontal scrolling on a 1024×768 screen (unless the poll results really surprised me and everyone was on 1920×1200+ these days).
It won’t be a big deal but will make it easier to lay out nav bars at the top, and text and preview graphics on the freebie pages, that sort of thing.
CD, you are quite right about people viewing the pics in automatic downsize. I tend to forget that people will do that (and accept the sometimes rather horrid quick resample that the viewers do. Internet Explorer’s is particularly vile, so the first thing I do when I launch IE on a new PC is turn everything like that off!)
On the flipside if they are viewing everything downsampled anyway, there’s an argument in favour of giving the afficianados with big screens a nice big high quality version in the first place.
Cheers, Hywel.
The forum ‘General Chat’ is closed to new topics and replies.