You often read that the web canvas is getting smaller. For many years monitor resolution was a major factor in the value of any PC or laptop, and we designed to meet this trend.

And then came netbooks, smartphones and tablet PCs. Size is no longer so important; or rather, portability is more important.

Which means we’re designing for smaller devices, no?

Obviously context is everything. For example, it’s more than likely that you’ll read your Twitter stream on a mobile device, but you’ll conduct in depth academic research on a laptop or PC.

Yet the extent to which people aren’t reading my site on a mobile device is, erm, interesting. Only 2% of the last month’s visitors used an iPad, iPod, iPhone or Android device.

On the other hand, 30% of them were using screens that were 1280 pixels wide. Over 85% were 1280 pixels and up.

Unfortunately we can’t measure the amount of work we put into designing a website. But if we could I’m sure that more than 2% of this site’s work was spent on getting it to look right on small screens.