# What resolution should I use?



## Bougie (Jul 12, 2005)

Could someone copy & paste your visitor statistics regarding which browser they are using, what screen resolution, and how many colors? 

Is the standard of 640 x 480 resolution and 256 colors pretty much gone now? Does anybody have to worry about "web safe" color palette anymore? I can't imagine anyone using 640 x 480 anymore. If they do, it seems to me that they must be either too poor or too cheap and they wouldn't buy a t-shirt anyway.


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## Shuffy (Sep 3, 2005)

Hi Bougie . . . I have mine set at 1024 x 768 with a 32 bit color quality


Diane


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## Twinge (Apr 26, 2005)

You shouldn't have to worry about adapting to 640x480 at this point (Maybe 1-3% of people left using that?), but you will have to worry about 800x600 (Could potentially be 20% of people using that). 16-bit colors should be perfectly fine; I would guess that even fewer people use basic 256 VGA than use 640x480.

The only note about web-safe colors is that they might be marginally important to having the site look the same on both PC and Mac, but I'm not sure and it may be a minor issue even if true (i.e., colors might look a little darker or lighter but not signficantly different).

Unfortunately, I don't have any REAL statistics on this; I don't believe web browsers post (give) any information about the screen resolution to the website at all, but I might be mistaken.


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

I wouldn't worry about using "web-safe" color palettes, but you should optimize your images so unnecessary colors are removed for faster loading times.

As far as the actual site design goes, you should either design a "fluid" design that expands and contracts depending on the users resolution or use a safe width like 768 like Yahoo does. That covers most of what people will have on the lower end of the resolution, and people on the higher end will still see the site just fine (just with whitespace on either side).


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## Twinge (Apr 26, 2005)

A good example of spreading out the layout can be found at http://www.thinkgeek.com/; it even works fine on 640x480.


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