Fixed vs Fluid Styles

[Kirk Y]

You can choose between either Fixed or Fluid.

[Quillz]

Generally, I prefer fixed styles, but recently, I've been designing some basic pages to be a fluid width of 80%, and I've liked how the pages have turned out.

[CyberAlien]

From my experience with forums, I'd say most people that use fixed width use it only to have some fancy logo they have designed that cannot be expanded. Some designers make only fixed width designs (including very good looking ones) only because they can't write valid html for fluid design as fixed width is much easier to code; such designs usually have invalid html that looks awful in non-IE browsers.

I disagree that fixed width designs have better readability - it all depends on how layout is designed, not on width. If design has parts that are just design elements that attracts user attention (such as flashing images, images with very high contrast to background, etc...) and that aren't part of content then readability will be bad no matter what width is used. And if page is designed to have content in easily readable format, such as postbit_legacy where posts are on one side and useless content (user profiles) is on other side, and there aren't any distracting elements, then page would be easy to read regardless of page width.

[MRGTB]

Well I'd have to say I prefer fix width style because you can control how the site looks exactly in other peoples browsers easier than a fluid style. The only thing you have to keep in mind is the fact some people may be using a low res on old PC's, such as 800X600 screen res if you intend for everybody to view your site OK. So there can b a down-side if your fixed width goes beyond 800 pixels wide.

But you can do so much more with a fixed width when it comes to skinning and get away with it, compared to skinning a fluid style. I just like a fixed width style anyway over a full width fluid style, just a matter of personal choice.

[Greek76]

Personally I like fluid and only use fluid.

[HPIA]

The one problem is how I always get this problem with fixed skins. Some posts go out of the limit I set. Even vb.org has the problem sometimes (see attatchment). Is there anyways to fix this?

[Smoothie]

Face it, anyone with half a brain will tell you fixed widths look like crap on larger monitors. The days of 600x800 are gone. And I gotta love web designers who make a fixed layout bigger than 1024x768.

[HPIA]

lol I got a 19 inch.

[aggiefan]

i do fixed width personally... its easier to give a uniform experince for all users (and we have an auto image resizer and the only way we can make it max out at a width is to set a width for the page and match it with our image resizer)

[imported_infitech]

I added a poll to this thread