I'm currently re designing my site, this may seem stupid but is fluid lay out deemed better than fixed?

the site is going to be for photography and video production. I went on a one day course last week and they seemed to think fluid lay out was better.

 

according to my web stats 79% of people that look at the site have 1024x768 so I was planning on making it fixed for this size.

I always used fixed width, I personally hate stretch sites. Some can do it well, but usually they break or things look weird when it's all resized.

where did you find those stats? they won't be www wide. It doesn't mean there exact for the whole net, just the site you were viewing the data...even if that's true, your missing out on 21% of people, that's a lot of people. around a million.

 

Do you want a million people to not be able to see your site properly? It would discourage sales and even employers as they wan to see a site that can easily be seen by all.

Agree with Nathan. 21% is way too high a figure to completely discount. 2% maybe.

 

Anyway there are ways round it. Building a fixed width to 745px should give you enough scope to cater for most users. Alternatively some cunning use of CSS and JavaScript could provide a resolution-dependant layout.

 

The problem with fluid layout is that unless you restrict maximum widths or heights on some elements the content gets massacred. Blocks of text become too short and way to wide to read properly. That said if it's mainly images then a fluid layout may be preferable.

thanks for the advice.

the stats where form Google the remaining % where for bigger resolutions and only 2% where for 800x600

I was planning on making a fixed width site for the 1024x768 because It should be ok on bigger screens.

You need to be very careful with statistics.

 

RESOLUTION doesn't mean the page width... it means the display width.

 

Subtract toolbars, navbars, scroll bars and the likes, and you'll realise that aiming for 1024 resolution means that ideally your site PAGE WIDTH should be around 800-900 pixels wide.

 

Ergo, RESOLUTION does NOT equal visible page area.

 

Now—also consider that most folk don't even REALISE they can change resolution from the usually default 800x600... and you start to realise that resolution needs a bit more thought than just 'averaging the population's settings'.

 

Go carefully

Yep, what seige said is true. Not everyone browses with the window maximised, and don't forget about toolbars and shizzle. For example, my laptop screen resolution is 1280*768 (which is very uncommon I think - I'm my only visitor with that size). Take out scrollbars and I've got about 1260 width, but I only have... 400px height. So although I'll show up in your stats are 1280*768, I'm really only 1260*400.

 

A fixed width might be easier for a photography site as it'll let you know exactly how much space you've got to work with. With a fluid layout you might find yourself with weird looking gaps.

 

However, one thing you might want to consider about a fluid layout is the "min-width" and "max-width" aspects. These will stop your layout being massively wide in large resolutions, and massively skinny in small resolutions. However, this doesn't work in IE.

Hi All

 

I both disagree and agree with all of the above ;-) We are just about to design our first floating eCommerce website. The reason for this is that so many users, according to Google Analytics (Table below), are getting bigger and bigger (wide)screens resolutions able hardware, and a lot of our client always ask about "the white, un-used space"...

 

1. 1024x768 24.93%

2. 1280x1024 18.79%

3. 1280x800 15.33%

4. 1920x1200 10.09%

5. 1680x1050 9.20%

6. 1440x900 7.81%

7. 1152x864 3.17%

8. 1300x1300 2.37%

9. 1280x854 1.68%

10. 1280x768 1.38%

 

We have the last year designed soley for 1024*768, making all website between 940 and 960 pixels fixed width. But since more and more of the user seems to have this new, modern widescreen hardware, we have decided to design one of our current websites "optimised" for 960 pixels width, but allow for it to float to wider than this using CSS etc...

 

Looking at sites like the new bbc.co.uk, guardian.co.uk and timesonline.co.uk makes me even more confident that the time for 800*600 is over and that the new minimun resolution to look after is 1024*768.

 

With regards to scrolling, i believe the max-scroll-per-page was 2.5 a couple of years ago, but this seems to have been increased somewhat as of lately, i suspect because of user becoming more and more used to it. I'd still always recommend keeping the key part of the website above the 400 pixel vertical mark.

 

I'd appriciate any feedback and different opinions, Patrik

I recently design a site which was half way between fixed and fluid.

 

It's readable but doesn't look great at 800x600, it looks fine at both 1024x798 and 1280x1024, and to stop it stretching too far I set a max-width to about 950px.

 

I don't think 800x600 can be ignored, but as long as the site is readable at that resolution I don't think you need to optimise for it!

 

- Eris

I think sites are very much unique, you can't have a rule that states all sites should be fluid/fixed it just depends on the site itself. Much like with resolution all sites you design don't need to be designed for 800*600...its is all to do with reseach into who is viewing your site.

 

So nothing is right or wrong when it comes to fluid vs fixed, neither is better than the other. But personal taste dictates to me that large quantities of text should be contained in a fixed width rather than fluid simply so the lines aren't too long on barge resolutions

 

 

Also a good rule of thumb for most fixed width sites is to center them....of course again this is just rule of thumb but if you have a boxy layout rather than something that blends and uses space having the site central means space around it is even and a little more pleasing on the eye

As others have mentioned above, there is no hard and fast rules for how you manage the width of your website. It all comes down to the content, and how much of it you will be displaying; never make a website fluid/fixed/elastic because "it's popular", or statistics tell you that you should.

 

I would suggest an elastic layout over a fluid one. That way you can set a maximum width of the website, but have it scale down for smaller browser windows. It is a popular option on sites with alot of content, so the lines don't get too long; If a line is too long, the visitor will not have a fun time reading it, and will be more likely to "scan" over your website.

 

If you go with a fixed layout, make sure you have enough width to be able to display any sort of content you will come across on your website. You don't want to decide on 800px (eg), and then half way through development find out that you're going to need it wider. I also suggest that you keep the width under 1000px, preferably between 900px and 700px; anything wider would not be practical with current majority resolutions. Also, having the width as a multiple of 2,4,6,8,12,16 (etc), would allow you to use a grid approach to designing the layout; however, this is a completely different issue, so I won't go into that on this thread.

 

I hope this helps you.

 

Rob

thanks to every one who has posted. there's lots of things I hadn't thought about!

Not a problem, I hope we've helped your issue

thanks again for all the info and advice. Im trying out a template from dreamwaver.

I no thats bad but I am looking at the code and tweeking it and it is doing what I want it to! Im starting to undersand how it works now!.

Starting with templates are great as you can unpick them and find out how they work - that's how I started