Web and Graphic Design HQ

When it comes to web layout, there’s still a fair bit of argument over minimum layout standards: designing your website to meet the needs of the least technically enabled visitor you’re likely to get.

I was listening to an expert today who has recently started designing for a minimum 1024 pixel screen width. To make that choice, and jump up above the 800×600 user level, he ASKED his customers BEFORE making the changes.

There’s actually a way to do this automatically and all of the time, without having to specifically ask.

How?

Using Google Analytics. While this free Google web tool is primarily useful to track and measure Google AdWords campaigns (and non-AdWords initiatives), it has a lot of other great features that make it great for web design. In Google’s own words:

Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site. Focus your marketing resources on campaigns and initiatives that deliver ROI, and improve your site to convert more visitors.

This tool isn’t a stand-alone software package, it’s code you add to your website. You then login to the Google Analytics website (as a free web service) and run everything through your web browser.

(This is different to something like Google Pack, which is a free collection of essential software. It’s an online service, like Google Mail or Google Maps — but you need a website so you can add the small chunk of html code to your pages. While we recommend Google Pack, it’s not needed for Google Analytics.)

It’s easy to install and use Google Analytics: we have it running on five of our websites.

Under the Content Optimization reports, there are “Web Design Parameters” that you can report on, for things such as:

• Browser version
• Screen resolution
• Screen colour depth (eg 256 colors, 24-bit, 32-bit)
• Test for things like Flash and Java

And plenty of other reports.

Using this information

Different sites of course attract different users. Pretty obvious, but that different user can often be provisioned with much different technology. For example, visitors to our main business site, www.dmk.com.au have a higher level of screen resolution, colors etc than visitors to one of our client sites which focuses on providing a community service: more home users rather than business users.

To compare (just using 2007 data), currently less than 4 percent of DMK visitors have an 800×600 screen resolution, but the client site providing a community service has just under 21 percent of users with that level of screen dimensions. So, it makes more sense to continue to cater for 800×600 screen sizes on that client website, as statistically, 21 percent is a fairly large portion of users.

The longer you run Google Analytics, the better idea you get of your visitors and how they interact with your site. This is just one way of using that data.

From another perspective, you wouldn’t, in this case, re-design for a minimum width at a size larger than 800×600 (next size up is 1024×768) — as you’d reduce readership for more than 20 percent of your visitors.

Using Google Analytics, this type of simple web design evaluation can help ensure you have the best solution in place for your specific visitors: you don’t have to rely on theory, you can test it with REAL people.

To install Google Analytics, go to www.google.com/analytics. You’ll even find things like “Conversion University” and, of course, a blog.