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I'm making a website now and I am trying to decide if I should make it fluid or not. Fixed width websites are much easier to make and also much easier to make them appear consistent.
To be honest though, I personally prefer looking at fluid websites that stretch to the full width of my monitor. My question comes from the fact that in most modern browsers you can hold control and scroll your mouse wheel to basically resize any website.
So is creating a fluid website worth the trouble?
It depends on your audience and your content.
The following are sites I respect and I think are example to imitate.
Fluid Examples:
Amazon
Wikipedia
Static Examples:
Apple
eBay
MSN
StackOverflow
MSDN
Some Mix it Up!
CNN
I think I prefer static most of the time. It is easier to make it look good in more browsers. It is also easier to read.
Making a website fluid, but adding a min/max-width attribute seems to be the best of both worlds, for me. You support fluidity, but you limit it at a certain width (say, 800px and 1200px).
It is up to you - here are some things to consider:
Text is hard(er) to read when lines are very long.
Your audience may have larger or smaller resolutions than normal, and picking an 'incorrect' static width will annoy them.
Maintaining a fluid site can be, but doesn't have to be much more difficult than its static counterpart.
Absolutely. It is a big inconvenience to people with huge monitors to have to resize the page. It can also be a bit dodgy with some layouts. Little inconveniences, no matter how trivial, can actually affect people's opinions of your site.
Also, netbooks have odd resolutions which make it hard to design sites for. For example, I'm writing this at 1024x600.
It's not particularly hard nowadays either (in modern browsers), especially with min- and max-height in CSS, and the new gradients, etc in CSS3, so image scaling won't be as big a problem in the near future.
In response to the comment below, I think that the pros outweigh the cons in this particular case - IE6 is a problem everywhere. We just have to deal with it.
You have to realize most computer users don't even KNOW HOW to zoom in the browser! Most users are so far from the understanding of computers that we have. We always have to remember that fact.
Text based apps: No. Table based apps: Yes.
Pros of fluid layouts
People with big monitors gets to use their screen real estate.
Easier for users with big monitors when you have a lot of information on your page.
Cons of fluid layouts:
A fluid width text column is hard to read if it's too wide. There's a good reason behind the use of columns in newspapers: it makes skipping to the next line much, much easier.
(Somewhat) hard to implement, because of the limitations in CSS.
If you're showing tabular data (iTunes, db manager, ...), fluid width is good. If you're showing text (articles, wiki pages, ...) fluid width is bad.
From my iPhone's perspective, fixed width layout is problematical when using code blocks. The scrollbar for wide code blocks doesn't show up, so I can't read the far right of the block.
Otherwise, I think it's a simple matter of what kind of site you're designing and how it looks on different size screens and windows. As previously mentioned, there's an option to set a maximum width, but the same caveat applies to code blocks and iPhones. I've designed both, and I don't prefer one over the other.
Although, it's fun to watch the boxes move around as I play with the browser size with a fluid layout, but I can be easily amused.
The most important thing is to consider dominant use cases of your web site or application. Do you expect people to use it exclusively on mobile devices? Mobile phones, netbooks, desktops?
Take a look at "Responsive Web Design" by Ethan Marcotte: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/
Great article that demonstrates the use of truly fluid layouts using media-queries. Sometimes you need to built out a separate front end for different user-agents, but sometimes media-queries are the perfect tool to service multiple resolutions across different user-agents.
It depends on what you're trying to do. Take a look at SO. It's fixed width and it's great. In fact, if it were fluid, it would be a bit of a PITA. Some sites look better with fluid layouts, but personally, I'd go with fixed unless you have a good reason to go fluid.
Many good points in the comments but from your question it seems you really like fluid designs and want to create one so go for it, it's your site, it doesn't have to be like every other site on the web.
Just be aware of pros ond cons of every solution.
Up to a point - yes.
There's a certain width, where text begins to become annoying to read if it's too wide. Easy to test if you have a large monitor, just grab notepad and paste some text into it without line breaks.
However, when going down to smaller sizes, being fluid might be a good idea. Mobile phone browsers are more and more capable of displaying "normal" websites just fine, but they are sometimes width-constrained, and as such, benefit if your site can fit in a bit smaller space.
Personally I also like to keep browser on my monitor but only at half of the monitor's width (24"). Sites which scale nicely into that are very good.
I think it's mostly a user convenience case. Not all sites will benefit from being fluid, but I think sites which have lots of text content are the ones that will most benefit from it, at least if they are fluid up to a max width (say 800px or whatever)
Yes. Page zooming is great but it is primarily used to make text bigger, not to make text fill the viewport. Certainly if the body text is already too wide, zooming down to make it fit will usually make it unreadable.
You need liquid layout if you're going to make the text fit the viewport whether or not it's zoomed.
The point about ‘long lines being hard to read’ is often overstated by designers trying to justify fixed width designs(*), but in reality it doesn't seem to hold quite as strongly on-screen as it did on paper. Of course setting a good leading/line-height is important, and max-width can be used to inhibit the worst excesses of long lines. (Set it in font-relative em units.) You don't get max-width in IE6, but that's not the disaster it once was. (You can fix it with a little bit of JavaScript if you really care about those guys. I don't.)
(* which are indeed less work for highly graphical layouts. But for a simpler layout like, er, StackOverflow's, there isn't really any reason not to go liquid. Tsk #SO, eh!)
Preface: Not a professional web artist.
I've found that there's way too many fiddly bits to get things to flow just so at cell-phone and uber-widescreen sizes, especially in anything of reasonably interesting complexity.
Typically, I design around having a fixed-width site in some fashion; usually bounded at [600,1200].
I also find super-wide columns of content to be a hassle to read. I seem to remember that there's some research which suggests an optimal number of words per column line.
You can make it like this.
# Make the main layout fluid and apply 'max-width: 1140px' to it and center it.
By this there won't be 'long lines' of text on bigger screens and proper settlement of web page on smaller ones (excluding 800x*** and lowers).
I have implemented this method in my new projects and it's working like a charm.
a.t.b .. :)
I think the decision fluid/fixed should be based also on content of the website:
For sites with big amounts of plain
information (like news portals),
better to use fluid layout.
Web-services better look and work in
fixed dimensions, so you always know
where interface elements are located
in their places and they are not moving
around constantly.
Yes, fluid websites are worth creating
As you said, it looks good and reasonable when you plan properly at design phase.
Your doubt about the impact of Ctrl + Scrollbar is not a big deal.
This feature is primarily for accessibility, to make text more readable by increasing the size.
However, if you mention all your sizes in Pixels (px) it won't happen.
Proper adjustment happens only when you use "em" to specify size. So you have a way to turn it on/off
I'm a big fan of fixed at < 800px... it's easier to read narrower columns, and it will work anywhere. That is, if you're trying to make a website that presents hypertext... Websites which present application front-ends, are I think another can of worms entirely...
Fluid design - truly fluid - is hard. Very hard. It's not just a question of page width - do your fonts scale, and does everything scale with them? Ideally:
Sizes should be defined in em rather than px
...and that goes for element sizes, not just fonts!
Given a change in font size or zoom level, the page elements should be the same size relative to each other
Our main product is fluid, and it's a pain from my point of view as a designer, especially because it involves a lot of user-generated content.
For one thing, images - in a fixed-width site, you can have an image that fills half the width, and looks great. In a fluid site, this image is just as likely to be lost in a sea of whitespace, looking rather lonely.
Life should be easier once border-radius and other CSS3 properties come into play more, but sadly our core audience are government workers, who all, ALL STILL USE IE F#!*ING 6!
To answer the question, "is it worth it"? Yes, if you do it right.
Here's a scenario: choose a fixed-width site: your boss displays it to a client on his brand-new, 1920x1600 laptop, then complains to you about "how it all looks small on this guy's screen!"
I think it's nice to be able to scale well on a user's screen, rather than make the users pan and zoom. In a time when users surf the web from such a wide variety of devices, ranging from smartphones to ultra-mobile PCs, each with its own, possibly non-standard resolution, I think it's important to keep user-experience at a high level when your site is viewed on such screens. Regarding the text length, it could be bounded by a certain ratio, so it would fit nicely within the layout. I think there are also frameworks that may help with writing a site in a fluid manner, and help with coding maintainability.
I'm gonna go against the majority and say NO. Reasoning: fluid sites like Wikipedia are a nightmare to read on large screens due to their long line length (though its citations make it hard to read at the best of times).
The problem really occurs because there is no mechanism to size text relative to the screen resolution. If you could automatically make text bigger on bigger resolutions, you could stay closer to the 80-odd characters per line that's generally regarded as the best for readability.
There is also the problem of images and other fixed-size elements. You can have large images and let the browser shrink them if necessary, but then you run into other problems like much longer download times, and image quality problems in many browsers.
I'm a fan of sites that do have a fixed max width of between 800px - 1000px, but can also scale down so that I can read the content without scrolling side-to-side and also without zooming out because often the text becomes too small to read and it hurts my eyes. So, this is normally want I strive for because I want to build sites I can be proud of.
Related
I am just building a new site for a client and want to make sure I serve him best. I am at the process of determining the page width.
First, for the last few years, my pages have been typically about 900 pixels wide and centered in the middle of the browser window. This works really well. That's not the approach I am taking now though. My old standard of 900-1000 pixels seems really small on today's monitors.
I am creating a three column page layout. The leftmost column needs to stick to the left side of the browser. If the browser is set really wide, there is a huge vertical dead zone on the right side of the browser. That's not really a problem since I doubt most people open their browser to 100% wide on a 1600px monitor.
My question is this: Is there a standard pixel width that you assume 90% of the people use to view a web site?
960 pixels!
It has plenty of denominations to allow you to split your page up into various columns. I suggest taking a look at http://960.gs
I know, as you said that it is small compared to your monitor, however there are a lot of users (the majority) who would benefit from keeping this resolution.
You can also consider using a so called "responsive" approach:
http://978.gs/
The idea is that using media queries (and substitute techniques) you adapt your layout to the viewport of your visitor, so ideally you can offer the best content to everyone.
If you made fluid-width pages, this wouldn't be an issue.
Monitors these days are all over the place. You will have to check your analytics to see what your particular audience is using.
If I make a fixed-width page, I usually still shoot for 980px. There are lots of netbooks popping up with resolutions of around 1024x800 and what not. Again though, there is no specific answer to this question, other than making pages without a fixed-width, or checking your own audience.
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 ;).
What is more popular these days - CSS fixed page width or flexible, how are the pages built in terms of CSS views layouts
what is most popular page resolution - 970 or 1024 px
Make it flexible and save yourself the headaches in the future. Pick a minimum size you're going to support, and make sure it scales.
If you make it fixed, it only looks good for a fraction of the people.
And, just because a person has a high resolution, doesn't mean the browser window will be maximized.
I think you'll find that if a site is fixed, it will most likely be designed for a screen width of 1024px, meaning the width of the contain will be around 960px.
This article does a good job summerizing some pros and cons of both approaches: Fixed vs. Fluid vs. Elastic Layout: What’s The Right One For You?
.
Definitely make it fixed. As a 1920x1200 user, 100% width pages hurt my eyes badly - I'm talking to you wikipedia.
Notable exceptions are igoogle, where you really need all the screen space you can have.
There is a reason most sites go for fixed layout. You should really do the same unless you have a very good reason not to.
Regarding popular resolutions, I would suggest examining your site with Google Browser Size.
Know our audience is better.
Global Web Stats
Browser Display Statistics
I choose 960 with fixed layout
I think this is a bit of a subjective question because I doubt most of us here will know what's trully more popular (or where those statistics might be).
Stack Overflow, for example, uses a fixed layout and most of the corporate sites I've worked on have been fixed width also.
My personal preference is for fixed layout. Partly because it keeps everything contained in a way I find preferable and partly because it means I can choose the page width myself based on my own preference in the moment (I tend to use CTRL +/- a lot daily).
As for what you should do, it depends on what you want to acheive, what you prefer, what your customers/users may find more usable etc.
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.