Scaling Your Site - Pixels or Percentages?
Monday, June 15th, 2009One aspect of your website that should be top priority is checking to see if it can load in a variety of resolutions. You’ll want to design your site so that it fits all monitor resolutions. Because nothing makes a potential visitor leave faster, than to see a site that is beyond navigation.
So, the question is…How can you make sure your site will load up on all resolutions?
First, you need to find a minimum resolution as your starting point. Here is a list of the different monitor resolutions as of now. A good starting point is the 800×600, as it’s still widely used.
When you’ve found your lowest resolution; this will be the res that you’ll want to design your site on. Depending on your monitor it can be a hindrance to work on real low resolutions. It is key however to do it this way though.
When you’re ready to start writing up your HTML, there’s one important key thing to remember. Always work with percentages not pixels. Specifically with the tables that are encompassing most of your site. The reason for this is that when you assign a measurement to a pixel size, it’s absolute. This isn’t good because as different resolutions are being used, the pixel amount appears differently on screen. Think of how different sized wallpapers look on your monitor.
With percentage based measurement, you’re getting a relative measurement. This works better because your site is loading based on a percentage of space. So, the basics of your site stay intact and don’t look out of place.
As you get deeper into your cells, the percentage rule gets less important. In fact the cell you use for your content won’t really need measurements hardly at all. If you do use measurements, just be sure it’s with percentages, not pixels.
