Comments on: Fixed-width layouts

By: Darren Taylor

Darren Taylor — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 17:40:03 +0000

The thing is with fluid layouts, forgetting about web standards etc is that aesthetically, they look vastly inferior. Looking at the 13 above, none of them inspire me, if I were a paying customer I wouldn’t accept any. I’ve been working with fluid layouts for over 5 years and fact remains that fixed width just look better. Now take that alone, is it not a very good reason in this endless debate to sway towards fixed, thinking of our end users who at the end of the day, are fickle and want pleasing?!

By: JF

JF — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 03:14:43 +0000

I’m not sure it’s a realy good idea to adopt a fluid layout. I know there is an issue concerning the respect of the user how visit the page, but there is an issue to in reading. I’m most a teacher (actually e-learning dev) than web developer, but I know some reader can have difficulties with long lines of text… if it’s not with the text they read, it’s with the motivation to read it…

Nice research Philip. Thanks

By: Philip Hutchison

Philip Hutchison — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 18:39:15 +0000

@tom i’ll probably go with a 1000px fixed-width, but try and work in an alternate stylesheet for mobile devices. ultimately, the fixed-width approach makes the site easier to design and maintain. for instance, you always know what image dimensions will work, and it’s less confusing for others who may need to collaborate with me on the site.

@steve i hear ya. my monitor at work is 24″, and i *never* maximize the browser. i have to manually size it so sites remain usable. i usually make my browser about 1/2 the monitor’s width.

By: Steve Howard

Steve Howard — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:05:06 +0000

I used to like totally liquid layout. But now I have a 1920 wide screen and some dumb designers still think I need to view their text-heavy sites in full screen mode. No I effin don’t.

Ultimately I prefer a fixed-width site that looks roughly similar in width to a little less than half my screen width. This matches your findings and matches this site

I think the reason is pretty simple. We cannot scan wide lines of text as easily as narrow ones.

The exception to my page-width preferences are sites that are design-based – images, video etc. rather than text based.

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 08:51:54 +0000

Quite an interesting sample of sites. What did you decide for the project in the end – fluid or fixed?

We’re in the process of trying to convince management of the benefits of fluid layouts for e-learning modules, rather than the traditional fixed window.

One thing that would be very interesting to know is whether the boom in large monitors necessarily corresponds to larger browser windows. My personal preference on a large monitor (anything over 19 inches IMHO) is to have the browser window sized sensibly, so that i’ve more space on the screen for other applications as well as the browser – IM, Email, etc.

I wonder if any web analytics packages could the visible window size of the users browser, as well as detecting the native screen resolution? It would probably be more relevant than screen res as it would take into account varying sizes of chrome from users having multiple toolbars installed. Any patterns of window size as the screen res gets larger could be very useful.