Screens are changing…

… and the Internet has to do the same! Today the common display at home is a 19 inch monitor (1280×1024) and has a 4:3 ratio but this is changing rapidly. A lot of you guys are upgrading to 22 inch wide-screen displays (1680×1050) and many people think screen real estate is growing – BUT actually it’s getting smaller. Many of you may now think I have gone nuts but it’s true due to multitasking and changes in Microsoft’s new operating system Windows 7, Google’s browser Chrome and most importantly how people use their computer a new and different design era has begun.

Here you can see what I was talking about the whole time because I only use half the screen for each browser the site has less width available. As you can see twitter works great on about 820 pixels of width but digg.com doesn’t do so great anymore it’s already showing a scrollbar but you can still use it. But some websites are not designed for small screens at all anymore here is the best example I could find: As you can see WordPress is basically unusable since the right sidebar covers more than half of the editing area. Also the screenshot shows how I use the other half of the screen.

But to get to the point I really want people to develop for small screens again. I am not talking about really small but keep in mind that the main content of the page should fit inside of 820 pixels of width specially because Windows 7 brings features with it where you can dock your apps to the side and more and more people will use it.