What is screen real estate?

It is the amount of space available on a computer screen for an application to display your content. As web designers and developers, what is most relevant for us is the the amount of space available within a web browser window - like Safari, Firefox, or Internet Explorer. This is the area under our control. This is the physical area web pages are displayed in. It excludes the browser scroll bars, address bars, status bar, menus, etc.

Typically, the effective use of screen real estate is one of the most difficult design challenges because of the desire to be as attractive, informative, and functional as possible - without over-doing it - and to minimize the need for hidden commands and scrolling - that busy people will not bother to look at.

There is a belief that you have to get your potential customers' attention in the first few seconds of them arriving at your website. This is because it is so easy to find other websites (yours is probably only one of hundreds or more produced from a web search), and people need to feel immediately that they have come to the right place for whatever it is they are looking for. They will not waste time digging through menus and scrollbars looking for things.

A very significant way to increase screen real estate is to use dynamic areas on the front web page - which automatically scroll or rotate different content in the same small space - without the user having to do anything.

A rotating 360˚ panorama or, better still, a virtual tour - a sequence of 360˚ panoramas - effectively present literally thousands of images to the user in a very small space...