Taskbar location

[Breckenridge Real Estate]

Does anyone know of a source of information that indicates where most web surfers keep their taskbar?

I know that this is a long shot which is why I am including a poll with this post.

[ResaleBroker]

I have nothing.

[SEO Jason]

there taskbar????? nope, sorry, never seen any stats on that. why do you ask?

[Breckenridge Real Estate]

I ask because it makes a difference as to the maximum size a table can be without having a slider show up at the bottom of the screen when the page is viewed.

For example, look a this page:

http://www.amenta.com/

When viewing this page at 800x600 resolution with the taskbar at the bottom, no slider shows up. With the taskbar on the side, where I keep it, a slider does show up.

Going by the stats that Jeff provided in another thread, about 1/3rd of viewers have their screens set at 800x600. And this number is decreasing.

If it turns out that very few keep their taskbar to the side as I do, then I will not worry about the slider at the bottom for this small and decreasing number of viewers. I would rather have the design make the most of the screen space for the vast majority of my users.

I am sure that some of you are thinking “why not just set the table size to 100% rather than to a specific number of pixels?”. The answer is that I am considering this but that will involve a complete redesign of the site as the header looks goofy at higher resolutions when the table fills the whole page. For the moment, I am just looking for a quick solution.

My site design had dated back to when 640x480 monitors were common as you can still see on many of the older pages. Right now I am just trying to make it look a little more appealing for today’s users.

[KSA]

I don't have any stats, but I can make a guess. I've worked with a lot of PC users, and what I've found is that most people would have no idea how to move the taskbar. :-)

So, my guess is that most users keep it at the bottom, since that's usually the default.

[Las Vegas Real Estate]

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