Yesterday, I added a sidebar to one of my sites.
Not a big deal. Except that I immediately received a lot of complaints.
The common factor for the people who complained was that they are browsing the site with a 800x600 screen resolution, while I blindly assumed that in 2007, people could at least display things that are 950 pixels wide.
I added a simple javascript logger:
function width_stats() {
var date = new Date();
date.setTime(date.getTime() + 30 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
var expires = '; expires=' + date.toGMTString();
var value = screen.availWidth;
document.cookie = 'width_stats=' + value + expires + '; path=/';
}
width_stats();
The value is recorded into a file:
if (!empty($_COOKIE['width_stats'])) {
if (($fp = @fopen('/tmp/stats.txt', 'a')) !== FALSE) {
fputs($fp, $_COOKIE['width_stats'] . ' ' .
@$_COOKIE['vbforumuserid'] . "\n");
fclose($fp);
}
}
And… ouch! Not less than 5% of users are still using a 800x600 resolution. 5% !!! In year 2007.
That site is a discussion board for girls. Maybe the fact that 5% of the users are still in 800x600 can be explained by the fact that they never configured Windows after the initial setup. Frightening.
The percentage would probably be way lower in a geek-related site.