Website Design And Browser Size For Maximum Visibility

Seeing as Google seems to be testing its screenshot previews of web pages again I

thought this may be a good time to highlight the importance of client browser size when developing or optimising a website.

For some time now Google has had this page preview, basically a screenshot of the indexed web page, but it's not on as default and is not widely discussed. The screenshot image sits next to the page description in the search engine results page (SERP).

Impact for Web Designers and Developers?

If this becomes standard then this could have a significant effect on click through rates as design may play a larger role in the user's initial decision. If someone is searching and sees a nice visual next to a result they may simply make an emotional decision based on that and click it.

Now I'm not saying that everyone will do this, page descriptions and keyword optimisation play a very important part in the initial decision as to which result to click. What I'm really saying is that web designers must optimise above the fold content, that's the content that is visible in browsers without needing to scroll.

The overall website design needs to ensure there is enough space above the fold to get the all important sales and service messages across.

So with page previews, if your primary website content is below the fold searchers won't see it on the screenshot and may simply look at the next result (your competitor) instead.

Size isn't everything

Now, I'm typing this on a 24" display with a screen resolution of 1920 x 1200 as it's a nice big workspace to use. Because of this it's very easy to design a website that simply takes up too much space on the screen.

Just because a web user has a large display with a high screen resolution doesn't necessarily mean that when they open Internet Explorer or Firefox that their entire screen is at the disposal of a website.

It's amazing how easy it is to go overboard with images and headers when developing only to be shocked at how little is actually visible on a 1024 x 768 screen!

Testing your Web Design

When designing a web page it's a good idea to make use of Google's Web Browser Size page from its labs. I find this very handy when developing or optimising a web site. You can enter your own URL and it clearly shows in percentage terms the amount of users for a specific browser size and also the viewable area that is available. This shows you exactly what, if anything, needs to move to be above the fold for maximum visibility.

You can test it now, go and take a look at how your website looks on Google's Browser Size and you'll see what I mean!

With this latest round of Google page preview experiments it once again highlights the importance of web design and how web optimisation plays a crucial role in the whole website development process.

by: Trevor Jones

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