Firstly, there's the screen resolution:

If you're designing a new application, it looks like it's pretty safe for you to assume that most people have at least 1024 x 768 monitors at their disposal (only around 5 percent have lower resolution than this). The above chart seems to gloss over hand-held devices, such as PDAs and mobile phones, used for Web browsing (or maybe there just weren't any such visits to my site from such devices), but that's an entirely different issue.

As an aside, it would be interesting -- for me, at least, being a curious cat -- to know how many visitors have recourse to multiple monitors. I suppose that this info is not recorded anywhere and thereby impossible to retrieve. Every power user should have as many monitors as needed, the hardware is pretty inexpensive these days. (I happen to have four 1600 x 1200 LCD monitors connected to my workhorse desktop system, which probably isn't all that common! And even when working with a laptop, like to have a secondary large monitor connected.)

And to conclude our complete this site anatomy tour de force, we may happen to be interested to know the monitor color depths:

Okay, all done. Pretty far out, what?

Lots of pretty pictures and not too many words to tax the grey matter. I hope this overview of a reasonably typical boutique web site was of some interest to you, and helps you better understand the rationale behind other sites you visit from now on.

By the way, I was wondering if I should title this iTWire article "Anatomy of a Modest Man's Web Site" ... but have to be honest and confess that I'm not really modest at all. You've already worked that out for yourself, I guess!

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