As technology is advancing every day, trends of Web surfers are also changing. Catch up on those trends and impress more visitors.
Screen Resolution
At the beginning of this year, more than 50% of visitors to my site were with a screen resolution of 800x600. Visitors with 1028x768 screen resolution were less than 40%. Today, 1028x768 (52.3%) is the most common screen resolution, followed by 800x600 (37.2%).
Even though monitors are getting sharper, I would still design Web pages for an 800x600 screen. 37% is too many to ignore, and not all 1028x768 users are surfing the Web with a maximized browser window. People who upgraded the monitor from 800x600 to higher resolution tend to use a window size close to 800x600. Also, there will only be extra empty space when 800x600 optimized pages are viewed on a larger window size, but it is quite awkward when you see 1028x768 optimized Web pages on an 800x600 screen.
Web Browser
You might already know Internet Explorer dominates the browser world. More than 95% of visitors use IE. The second most popular browser is Netscape. But, Opera is gaining in presence (recent stats: Netscape 1%, Opera 0.9%). One thing to note is that you can configure Opera to pretend to be other browsers. If you set Opera to be IE, for example, the access with that Opera will be counted as an access with IE. Somehow, default configuration is set to IE. So, there might actually be more Opera users than Netscape users. The bad thing is that your Web pages may look different on Opera than on IE or Netscape. Make sure your Web pages look good on Opera as well.
Miscellaneous
Here are other stats that might help you to make more user-friendly Web pages.
Java Applet (not JavaScript) support - 98.6%
Note: Microsoft has stopped distributing Microsoft VM , so use Java VM .
Macromedia Director support -- 51.9%
Flash support ---------------- 95.8%
Real audio support ------------ 55.3%
Quick Time audio support ----- 46.7%
Windows Media audio support - 95.2%
PDF support ------------------ 77.9%
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