David Fiske Affiliate marketing & web development musings from Fiske Towers

I must admit that there have been a lot of changes on Compare Sat Nav recently.

More advertisers have been added (I am currently on 19 retailers) and there is one more to be added.

The last couple of advertisers I added sell systems that most of the others do not so I need to update the menu as these have not yet been added to the navigation.

I also changed the navigation yesterday. On an 800 x 600 browser setting, the bottom of the menu was chopped off! That is not very good in all honesty!
 
I am designing for an 800 x 600 pixel resolution on the basis that people with a 15 inch monitor may use this resolution. I personally use 1280 x 1024 pixels as my screen can take that. Whilst I have no problems with the navigation, there may be some visitors that do. This means that they may not be able to navigate to the page they want, therefore becoming inaccessible.

I have just had a look at the stats to get screen resolution stats and noticed that for the phrase "Compare Sat Nav", I am 9th in Google! For a site that has been running for 11 days, that is not bad!

Anyway, back to the screen resolution stats:

• 1024 x 768 (63)
• 1280 x 1024 (54)
• Unknown (18)
• 800 x 600 (6)
• 1152 x 864 (5)

The number in brackets is the number of screens detected. The unknown resolution would signify search engine bots.

You can see that only 6 people have browsed with an 800 x 600 resolution (4%) but it still has to be considered. If this was 1%, I would design for the next size up (1024 x 768). As monitor sizes increase whilst costs reduce, this will undoubtedly occur soon.

What I have done to the menu is add an extra column. Instead of seeing a list of manufacturers first, visitors now see a list of groups (e.g. A to F). If they hover over this, they can see all the manufacturers beginning with the letters A to F.

Not ideal but then at the moment, this is the best that I can do.

It is better than a vertical navigation bar which would extend down at least three scrolls - and that is just the price comparison tab. What would happen when I add the reviews section?!

Anyway, the final retailer should be added this afternoon and then I shall rebuild the menu, ready for the next step!