What is is screen resolution and why do you need to know?!

Your screen resolution determines how much stuff you can see on your monitor. Your screen displays blocks of colour (pixels) - everything you see is made up of little tiny blocks of colours. In the image below, the one inch block on the left has only one block of colour, whereas the second has 4. So, the first block is at a resolution of 1 dot per inch (dpi) and the second is at 4 dpi*

 

 

You can see from this simple demonstration that the higher your resolution, the more stuff you can fit into the same area, albeit considerably smaller. The size of your monitor never changes (unless you buy a new one obviously) But it is possible to squeeze more stuff onto it by changing your screen resolution. This depends on the capability of the graphics card inside your computer (rather than your monitor) as a more powerful card is required to keep rendering your screen into many thousands of pixels.

 

Statistics tell us that the average person is looking at a screen displaying 1024x768pixels (or more) ...

 

 

The stats above were taken from last month (March 2008) at a site called bromley.co.uk which we host and which has a very broad demographic.

 

When it comes to making websites obviously it is pretty important that your visitors can see all the important stuff fitting on to their screen. If I design a site which has a viewable content area of 1000 pixels wide (like this site) and you are viewing it as a screen resolution of 800x600 then it stands to reason that you will have to scroll sideways to view the extra 200 pixels of my site, which is no doubt going to annoy you very quickly.

 

So, this means we have to make sure we design your site so that it will work and look good even on the most rubbish of old computers. Or do we? Maybe your offering is entirely business to business (in which case you might reasonably assume that they have slightly better IT than some home users will) Maybe you are pitching up to a userbase that you are highly confident will have good IT equipment. Or maybe you are targeting silver surfers who may not have the best equipment. Like everything else in making a website it should all be about who your audience is.

Assuming you're using a PC running Windows XP (we'll get to Macs & Vista later) right-click somewhere on your desktop (that's the bit of screen you can see when you haven't got any windows open) and click Properties. A little window should appear, which has some tabs across the top. I want you to click the one called Settings

You should see a section called Screen Resolution which will tell you what resolution your screen is presently set to, and possibly a slider which would allow you to increase or decrease it.

* dpi is actually not a measurement of screen resolution, it is most commonly associated with a thing called print resolution which a different thing to screen resolution, but it is used here to demonstrate a principle. It is also vaguely touched upon in another article over here.