Netbooks are becoming more popular every day. People mainly use them for Internet, office applications or multimedia. With the development of fast mobile Internet technologies such as 3G, they become more important. They are small so they can be carried easily. But this very reason causes some problems while browsing the Internet. Most of the netbooks have 800x600 or 1024x768 screen resolutions, while most of the websites are designed for higher resolutions nowadays.
Have you ever seen a Drupal theme designed for low resolutions such as 800x600 ? Ok, some fluid layouts look alright even on low resolutions if they are designed properly (and if they don’t have large images). I think in short time, all the netbooks will provide at least 1024x768 resolution, but many themes also don’t fit in a 1024 pixel width screen.
The height of the screen must be considered also. With some toolbars and tabs, you already lose half of the page to your browser. Is the other part enough for the site? With a 400px high header image, even your menu won’t find a place for itself on the opening screen.
With wide variety of devices to surf on the Internet, this issue is becoming increasingly annoying. Do we have to design different layouts for wide screens, iPhones, netbooks and PSPs? Nowadays, you can even browse the Internet with some refrigerators :) Come on…
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