Why your mobile site should still stay 320px wide

Back in 2008, mobile web sites were easy. They were 320px wide because that’s what the iPhone was. They were also easy, because they didn’t really exist.

When we started designing mobile websites, 320px wide was definitely ingrained. It was all fun and games until Apple released the iPhone 4 and upped the resolution. App developers started creating two sets of images, one for the 320px x 480px screen and one for the 640px x 960px screen.

Web designers were split. They didn’t know what they should do. Some said they needed to design to 960px, some said they didn’t.

Now there are a million smart phones out there.

With many different resolutions.

So why should your mobile web site stay at 320px wide? 

Two reasons:

1. Physical size. Pixels per inch doesn’t mean anything. What matters is that the screen that your site will be view on will be between about 3.5 and 4.5 inches. Whether that screen is made up of six pixels or six million pixels. The physical size is the same.

2. Web pages need to load fast! Keeping the site designed for 320px wide keeps your images smaller. Keeping images smaller increases load time. Our 3g networks are choked. They’re getting slower, not faster. Load time on a phone matters!