Post | mennovanslooten.nl/blog

A week or two ago I decided to sign up for the free Google Analytics to find out some more information about the visitors of this site. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to know or what I was going to do with that information but it's taught me some interesting stuff already.

Obviously, the first thing I wanted to find out was the amount of unique visitors I actually got. Now that I know, I want to thank both of you for being so loyal. :)

There's a whole lot of interesting information to be found inside Google's reports, like country of origin (mostly US) and search query strings used to find me (mostly "javascript array splice" or something with "backbase") but there's one thing I'd like to share with you: screen resolutions.

As some of you may have noticed, I've been experimenting on my blog homepage with different techniques to create a fully scalable, liquid layout that adapts to your font size. How successful my experiments are I am still not sure but I am aware that it works better on some resolutions than on others. For instance, at anything smaller than 1024 pixels wide it's not very attractive at all and my approach starts working against itself. The text-align:justify doesn't get enough space and creates big empty gaps between words and the text inside the single-line tables gets cut off after two words making them practically unusable.

However, before I address this problem it's useful to know how necessary this is. In other words: how many people actually visit this site with a screen resolution smaller than 1024 pixels wide? After a couple of weeks of use Google tells me this:

Apparently, the vast majority of visitors I get have a large screen resolution. It seems I don't really need to fix this problem. But here I almost fall into a trap I've seen many people fall in: screen resolution doesn't equal browser size. Especially at large resolutions, few people surf with a maximized browser. Unfortunately, these statistics don't teach me anything at all.

Anyway, since I'm always looking for stuff to improve on this site addressing the "small resolution problem" doesn't seem like such a bad idea. Chances are you'll be seeing various changes in the homepage as I'll be trying out some experiments. Also, I'll see if I can get some browser size statistics out of or into Google Analytics. So if either of my two visitors has more information about that, I'd really appreciate it.