Initial Content Res: Width - 680 - Height: Dynamic
I have determined the page size through research collected by W3Schools where in January 2011 they determined that most computers today have a screen resolution above 1024 X 768. I am going to use 1024 X 768 as my starting resolution for all pages, the height will change as users find it natural to scroll a web page up or down, but the page will not increase horizontally as this is an un-natural movement and is rarely seen on web pages. My web page content shall be centre styled as this will work best with monitors and will increase the accesibility across different screen systems. The website will be made to function with computer web browsers and not for mobile or tablet devices.
The website will be targetting specifically education users in my Sixth Form, where the browser is Internet Explorer 8 and the screen resolution is 1024 x 768. I shall expect users to be accesing the site from home too so I shall design this with that intention too.
W3Schools collected research on browsers and in December 2011 found that Firefox had the highest usage with 37.7% of the market using the browser, followed by Google Chrome at 34.6% and then by Internet Explorer at 20.2%. Because of the amount of users using Internet Explorer and my primary target audience using Internet Explorer 8 this is holding my sites potential back as I will not be able to use some of the latest web technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3. Most of the content will have to consist of Javascript, HTML4 and CSS2. I would like to limit the amount of Flash Player content and preferrably use none.
Above is my initial plan for the layout of the site and content.
Grey - Float & Background - 1024 x 768
White - Header and User Nav (Top) - 680 x 29 & 680 x 60
Blue - Video Player Divider - 400 x 440
Green - Side Stream - 210 x 440
Purple - Location Nav - 680 x 15
Orange - Special Nav - 227 x 60 (each)