It’s been proven that over the past couple years the average screen resolution has gone from 800×600 pixels to 1024×800 pixels or higher. According to research done by W3 Schools, screen resolutions in Jan 2009 yielded around 55% of users operate at the 1024×800 or higher screen resolutions and to be exact, 40% of those users operate at 1024×768. Additionally, top companies like Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, and YouTube all switched their website layout to the standard 1024×768 in February 2008, to accommodate for the majority of web users out there. So, it seems that as technological advances are made and monitors become cheaper, the rate at which people are purchasing them and purchasing even bigger monitors is picking up rapidly.

So, does this mean that as screen resolutions become bigger and as we understand that the large majority of users use this higher resolution size, that we should optimize our landing page layouts for this size? In order to answer this question you have to understand a few other things.

1.)    What types of monitors and resolutions do the majority your target audiences utilize? Of course, the general guideline is to accommodate to the most common users on your site but if you don’t know that information then you can confirm with Google Analytics.

1. Google Analytics is probably the most common tool used to check out these metrics. You can see exactly how many visits, conversions, transactions, revenue, or the bounce rates from users who have these specific settings. Also, incorporating some of the other metrics, such as browser and operating systems, can help give you an eye into the typical demographics and users that actually purchase on your website.