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Beantin Webbkommunikation is James Royal-Lawson+46735931654, Stockholm-based digital strategist and web managerwebbkonsult, webbrådgivare
On this blog you can find articles that cover web strategy webbstrategi, intranets intranät, trends (often with a Swedish twist), analytics, and running an effective web presence. Check out my most popular posts.
A few years ago I wrote about how screen sizes were getting getting smaller, and this is proving to be the case. Tablets, Android devices/iPhones, iPads - the number of horizontal rows (in landscape mode) is really getting squeezed.
The BBC Internet blog often produces some really good in-depth insights into how things work at the BBC. This time, in connection with the recent redesign of BBC News, they take a look at web management, web standards & their in-house CMS
Previously I’ve written about the importance of browser viewport size, and also explained how you can measure the browser viewport of your visitors and store the result in Google Analytics as events.
Given the 25 million sites out there running Wordpress, I decided to invest a bit of time into creating a Wordpress plugin to track viewport size. It uses exactly the same technique as described in my earlier post but conveniently wrapped up as an easy to install Wordpress plugin.
You can download the Measure Viewport Size plugin from the Wordpress plugin directory. Or you can install it directly from your Wordpress site by searching for “Measure Viewport Size” from the “add plugin” page.
There are a few prerequisites; you will need to have Google Analytics installed on your site (the asynchronous “_gaq” version). I’ve tested the plugin with Google Analytics for WordPress and it works fine. You will also need to make sure that your theme supports the body_class trigger. The body tag in header.php wthin your active theme should look something like the following:
<body <?php body_class(); ?>>
You can then view the events that have been recorded as people visit your site in Google Analytics under Content -> Event Tracking. It can take a day or so for the events to be processed and to appear in your GA reports, so be patient!
50 pixels fewer in available height for content could be the difference between your call to action being visible or disappearing below the fold. That could have a noticeable impact on your conversions and goals.
The browser viewport is the window in to your world. Your visitor sees everything through it. So why drive blind when you can quite easily gather and analyse a bit of data?
I wrote about browser viewport statistics in November and how we spend far too much time measuring and focusing on screen resolution where we should be concentrating on browser viewport size.
There are plenty of statistics available on screen sizes/resolutions and their usage. Equally there are plenty of articles available on how you should optimise your site design for this size or that size.
The truth is that screen resolution is only half of the equation. The other half, and more important for the end-user experience, is the browser viewport (window size).
A user might have the world’s largest screen; but unless their run their browser full-screen, this fact isn’t very relevant to us. And even if they did; they might have so many toolbars, bookmarks, and a page history sidebar that their viewpoint will only be a tiny fraction of what you might expect.
We need to switch our focus from screen resolutions. Web usage is diverging; for some screen sizes are getting bigger. Whilst for other screen sizes are getting smaller. Website statistics suites need to gather data on visitor’s actual viewports - it is already possible in some - so we can move forward.
In October 2009 an interesting project began. w3census intends to help developers, with a live database, to be always up-to-date with the current state state of the web. In that database will be, amongst many other things, Browser Viewport Size. One to watch.
Update Jan 2010: w3census has vanished, including their twitter account. Shame, it looked interesting. In the meantime, I’ve added written a post explaining how you can measure browser viewport size yourself.
