Is It Time To Stop Supporting Small Screen Resolutions?

I was just browsing my stats for the past week and a half since my new blog went live and noticed a very cool trend. Screen resolutions are getting bigger and bigger. Gone are the days where your website has to fit inside 768 pixels wide.

Since I have relaunched this blog, only 0.7% (yes, less than 1%) of my visitors were browsing on an 800*600 resolution. About another 0.4% browsed on a resolution lower then 800*600. The rest all had larger resolutions with the most popular being 1280*800.

Now, the interesting thing for me is for how long this trend of using larger and larger screen sizes will continue. I want to think that 800*600 resolutions will be completely dead in time but my head says they wont. Why? Because of netbooks.

Netbooks are becoming more and more popular. The 7″ EeePC has a resolution of 800*400 pixels. With the rise in popularity of netbooks, the browser sizes may even start falling. The bigger EeePC’s such as the 8.9″, 10″ and 10.2″ models have resolutions of 1024*600 which for me is a more reasonable resolution.

And then we have cell phones. In my stats above I have not included mobile traffic which this site actually gets quite a bit of. For me the web and the mobile web are two completely different things. As mobile is becoming more and more popular you should definitely have a separate version of your website for mobile (hint: MobilePress if you are using WordPress). But that right there is the key. You need a separate version of your site. There is no way (at least at this point in time) that you can optimize and integrate your current web presence with your mobile web presence without having a separate mobile version of your website.

My hope for the future is that more and more people start optimizing their web presence for larger resolutions (because they CAN!) and that they also have a separate mobile web presence because as it stands, mobile is about to explode in popularity.

Mobile Web