My site's CSS is currently taken care of by Twitter Bootstrap, and it looks/works great at high resolutions such as the one of my 1920x1200 monitor. However, as soon as I go to a smaller device such as a smartphone, and even my very high resolution iPad 3, I notice all sorts of quirks that were simply not there on my computer screen. I can of course simulate them by resizing the browser window down horizontally.
The quirks are generally some form of random resizing (the images will resize before the header text) and eventually everything turning into one single big column, which is pretty much useless and inscrutable to anybody browsing the site.
How do I make the site look exactly the same on smaller screens? Look at apple.com and nest.com and you'll notice that they're both identical on any device you use to visit them.
I know it's Bootstrap trying to be more responsive/fluid, but I feel like that unless I spend a considerable effort fine-tuning that behavior for different horizontal resolutions, I'm much better off showing users the same version on any screen. Is there something I can turn off in Bootstrap that will prevent the smart stacking of spans and will preserve the same shape everywhere?
Thanks a lot!
I have started learning some web development lately and have noticed lot's of sites just use Pixel dimension to specify sizes of thins as well as the overall size of the body.
This seems counter intuitive to me (maybe because I am used to programing for Android)
But this could make the website a pain to view on lower res screens and less useful on higher end screens.
Is this really the way things are done? Does this not cause to much problems?
Thanks.
EDIT: how would one go about implementing a less fixed size site?
There are pros and cons to doing things like this.
Pros: It allows you to have full control over where everything is placed as sometimes with relative sizing things will move in unexpected ways.
Cons: Well you mentioned them! Different size screens will give the site a different look.
But overall to some people it is more important that everything remains in the right place than that everything looks great on all screen sizes. Ultimately it depends on the preference of the designer. Also remember that uses on higher resolution screens can zoom in and those on lower resolutions can zoom out!
Peaces and pears.
Each to their own, so long as they are consistant and know what they are doing that is all that matters.
I have recently starting using grid templating which uses pixel dimensions for containers and I really enjoy it. Considering that 960.gs (960px) is an accepted size width for a website, if you know that you do not want to develop a fluid template, then why not use fixed width pixels.
If I am going to have a mobile version of my phone, then I serve the mobile version not my 960px website, and in any case, most phones intuitively display websites anyway. (At least the latest phones, obviously not the old Nokia 8210's ;).
I am sure you have all come across this before but I just wondered if there were any new techniques out there.
I have been making a design for a client and they want everything 'above the fold' basically so that the pages fill the screen without scroll bars. I have explained that people look at web pages in browsers at different sizes and resolutions of different sizes etc etc, but this is what they want.
So I made a design that fit the viewport of Firefox at 1280 by 1024 which is the most common size.
Inevitable the client is now moaning that when they view this on their laptop screen 'the bottom gets cut off' so I change the design to fit 16x9, but then 'theres too much space at the bottom on the desktop now'...
I then stupidly showed them the ctrl+ zoom on Firefox, and they said, 'Thats exactly what I want, I dont want the layout or proportions on the site or text to change, I just want the whole thing to scale as it is to fill up the space'
I told them that I didn't think that was gonna happen, but I just thought I'd ask the community if they had any new answers to this unfortunately common request?
I think you're looking for a liquid layout
I'm asking this question purely from a usability standpoint!
Should a website expand/stretch to fill the viewing area when you resize a browser window?
I know for sure there are the obvious cons:
Wide columns of text are hard to read.
Writing html/css using percents can be a pain.
It makes you vulnerable to having your design stretched past it's limits if an image is too wide, or a block of text is added that is too long. (see it's a pain to code the html/css).
The only Pro I can think of is that users who use the font-resizing that is built into their browser won't have to deal with columns that are only a few words long, with a body of white-space on either side.
However, I think that may be a browser problem more than anything else (Firefox 3 allows you to zoom everything instead of just the text, which comes in handy all the time)
edit: I noticed stack overflow is fixed width, but coding horror resizes. It seems Jeff doesn't have a strong preference either way.
Raw HTML does just that. Are you changing your data so that it doesn't render so good in random sized windows?
In the olden days, everyone had VGA screens. Now, that resolution is most uncommon. Who knows what resolutions are going to be common in the future? And why expect a certain minimum width or height?
From a usability viewpoint, demanding a certain resolution from your users is just going to create a degraded experience for anyone not using that resolution. Another thing that comes from this is what is fixed width? I've seen plenty of fixed size windows (popups) that just don't render right because my fonts are different from the designer's.
In terms of web site scaling I like fixed sized web sites that scales nicely using the browsers "zoom" function. I don't want a really wide page with tiny fonts on my 1920 res monitor. I don't know if the web designer has to do anything to make it scale nicely when zoomed, but the zoom in FF3 is awesome, the one in IE7 is useless...
The design should be fluid within sensible bounds.
Use CSS has min-width and max-width properties (which work in every browser, including IE7+) to prevent design from stretching too much.
The important thing is never to have a block of text stretch too wide. If a window is expanded, no block of text should indefinitely stretch to match because reading becomes a difficulty.
Like people have said, it really depends on what information the site is displaying. Two good examples are StackOverflow, and Google Images..
If stackoverflow stretched to fit the screen, longer answers would be annoying to read, because the eye finds it difficult to scan over long lines - this is exactly why newspapers use columns for everything, and why books are the all the same sort of width.
With Google Images, where the content is basically a bunch of 200px wide images, it stretches to fit the browser width and is still perfectly readable.
Basically, bear in mind the eye hates reading long lines of text, and base your design on that. You can design your site so when you increase the font size, all the layout scales nicely with it (The only site I can think of that does this is www.geektechnique.org - press Ctrl+-/= or Ctrl+scrollwheel, and the layout changes width with the font size)
I guess like a lot of things: it depends. I usually do both. Some content stays fixed width to look good or if it can't benefit form more space. other stuff is set to 100% if it seems like it'd be usefull.
This should be decided on how complicated the design of your website is. The more complicated, graphically or component wise (amount of content divs), will determine how well your website will scale. Generally you will find most graphic designers website will not scale because they are graphically intensive. However informational website will scale to make the best use of readable space on the screen and are not complicated for ease of use. Its a matter of preference really.
I think it depends on the content of the site. Sites like SOFlow, Forums, and other sites have an emphasis on reading lots of details, so having more real estate to do so is a big benefit in my mind. The less vertical scroll, the better.
However, for sites a little less demanding on the reading level, even blogs or retail sites where you're simply displaying an individual product, having a fixed width allows you to keep things more concise.
I'm a big fan of fully-fluid designs. As to the usability complaints about lines of text that are too long... if they're too long because of the size of my browser window, then I can just as easily make the window narrower as I can make it wider.
This is a matter of styling preference. Both can be equally usable depending on implementation. Columns can also be used, if the screen gets wide enough. Personally, I find it annoying when there is a single, narrow column of text going down the screen.
Edit for 2012: Yes, your website should respond to the size of the window it is being displayed in.
There are many places to read more about this, including:
http://johnpolacek.github.com/scrolldeck.js/decks/responsive/
http://www.abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_Web_Design
Note: if you use the zoom functionality in your browser, a fixed layout squashes the text, whereas a fluid layout allows it to take up the whole screen.
Maybe this is just a browser problem, but it's definately an argument in favor of fluid
Paragraph widths larger than your display make a web site completely unusable. You have to jiggle the horizontal scrollbar back and forth for every single line you read. I'm doing a web design subject at university and the textbook calls the designs which adapt to your screen width fluid layout.
I'm designing my big class project using fluid layout, it's a bit more trouble than fixed width. I suspect none of the other students will use it, the markers won't notice and none of the professional sites we're imitating are fluid either.
I'd say fluid all the way. The user can always go back to a smaller size window if he doesn't like the result of enlarging it, but he can't do anything about a fixed layout.
If you really, really hate the idea of your site looking ugly because of something a user with a large screen does, then for the sake of all that is true and beautiful, at least never use pixel-based fixed layouts! CSS has these neat text-relative size units like "em" that allow parts of your page to scale with the font size while others (like images) stay in their "natural" size.
Why not use them and make your page scale well without relying on the less flexible "scale everything" of FF3 that's really just a workaround for sites that use a dumb pixel-based fixed layout?
A lot of people are saying things like "this is a matter of taste" or "I don't like big fonts on my high-pixel display." Number of pixels has nothing to do with it, and it's not a matter of taste. It's a matter of DPI, which is directly related to display resolution and font size. If your layout scales along with the DPI of the fonts (by being specified in ems for instance, and using SVG), then you end up with very beautiful, very crisp websites that work optimally with any display.
http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/creating/anyresolution.html
There's probably a compromise design between fixed and fluid designs. You can design a site fluid-like but set the css property max-width to 1024 (or whatever). This means you get a fluid layout when the window width is less then 1024 and fixed width when it is greater.
Then narrow screen users (like my 800 pixel eee 701) don't have to twiddle the horizontal scrollbar to read every single line and wide screen users (who don't know how to resize their browser window) don't get 500 character wide, 1 character high paragraphs.
Now that most of the major browsers support full page zoom (at present, the only notable exception being Google Chrome), are liquid or elastic layouts no longer needed? Is the relative pain of building liquid/elastic layouts worth the effort? Are there any situations where a liquid layout would still be of benefit? Is full page zoom the real solution it at first appears to be?
Yes, because there are a vast variety of screens out there commonly ranging from 15" to 32".
There is also some variation in what people consider a "comfortable" font size.
All of which adds up to quite a range of sizes that your content will need to fit into.
If anything, liquid layout is becoming even more necessary as we scale up to huge monitors, and down to cellphone devices.
Doing full page zoom in CSS isn't really worth it, especially as most browsers now do this kind of zooming natively (and do it much better - ref [img] tags).
As to using fixed width, there is a secondary feature with this... if you increase the font size, less words will be shown per line, which can help some people with reading.
As in, have you ever read a block of text which is extremely wide, and found that you have read the same line twice? If the line height was increased (same effect though font-size), with less words per line, this becomes less of an issue.
Yes, yes yes! Having to scroll horizontally on a site because some designer assumed the users always maximize their browsers is a huge pet peeve for me and I'm sure I'm not alone. On top of that, as someone with really crappy vision, let me say that full page zooming works best when the layout is liquid. Otherwise you end up with your nav bar off the (visible) screen.
I had a real world problem with this. The design called for a fixed width page within a nice border. Fitted within 800 pixels wide minus a few pixels for the browser window. Subtract 200 pixels for the left menu and the content area was about 600 pixels wide.
The problem was, part of the site content was dynamic, resulting in users editing and browsing data in tables, on their nice 1280x1024 screens, with tables restricted to 600 pixels wide.
You should allow for the width of the browser window in dynamic content, unless that dynamic content is going to be predominantly text.
Stretchy layouts are not so much about zooming as they are about wrapping - allowing a user to fit more information on screen if the screen is higher resolution while still making the content acessible for those with lower resolution screens. Page zooming does not achieve this.
i think liquid layouts are still needed, even though browsers have this full page zoom feature i bet a lot of people dont know about it or know how to use it.
Page zoom is horrible from an accessibility perspective. It's the equivalent of saying "we couldn't be bothered to design our pages properly [designers], so have a larger font and scroll the page horizontally [browser developers]". I cannot believe Firefox jumped off the cliff after Microsoft and made this the default.
Yes - you don't know what resolution the reader is using, or what size screen - or even if accessibility is required/used. As mentioned above, not everybody knows about full page zoom - I know about it, but hardly use it...
Only your own site's visitors can tell you if liquid layouts are still relevant for your site.
Using a framework such as the YUI-CSS and Google Website Optimizer it's pretty easy to see what your visitors prefer and lay aside opinion and instead rely on cold hard results.
Liquid layouts can cause usability problems, though.
Content containers that become too wide become exceptionally difficult to read.
Many blogs have fixed width content containers specifically for this reason.
Alternatively, you can create multi-column content containers so that you get an effect like a newspaper, with its multiple columns of thin containers of text. This can be difficult to do, though.