I'm sure you've heard that a web site should be designed for the lowest common denominator,. That way you maximise the potential audience that can view your site easily.

Of course 14 inch monitors died out years ago along with Windows95 so designing for 640x480 is silly. But 15 inch screens (800x600) are almost impossible to buy new these days and I've been wondering how many of these are still in use and why people still design sites for that resolution (or for IE 5.x and Netscape 4 for that matter).

I use sitemeter to check visitor patterns for the blog and one of the things they have is a way of checking resolution of screens. Here's what I saw when I checked recently...

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As you can see, almost everyone has a resolution of 1024x768 or higher. The 800x600 resolution is a paltry 3%.

Similarly, colour depth is at 32-bit for 94% of the visitors as well.

I guess the days of designing for limited colours and small resolutions are over. 1024x768 resolutions at full colour can now be treated as the lowest common denominator.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, IE 5.x made up a whopping 1% of the visitors. It's all IE 6+ and Firefox these days. No Safari, Camino or Konqeuror and very little Opera.