Narrow width or flexible width

[nowlearner]

Hi,

when I'm designing a site, is there a difference between fixed narrow width resolution and flexible width?

which one is actually preferred?

thanks.

[Marshall]

IMHO, fluid widths are subject to design and content. Some designs just do not stretch well and, if content in minimal, you end up with a l o n g sentence rather than a nice paragraph. That being said...

You may want to consider a max-width design. If you go with a fixed width, consider most popular browser resolutions which I believe 50% are using 1025 pixels. Generally, what I do, is design a site with three columns and when it is fixed width, I make the width around 950-1000 pixels with the third column containing information that is less important. That way, people with browser settings of <900 pixels do not have to scroll left/right constantly. Either way, I center the whole design so there is not too much empty background left or right. I thinks it gives it a nice balance.

Marshall

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

This is a subject that comes up regularly and I agree with Marshall, 100% widths sometimes do not stretch well and the placing of text in relation to images can be unpredictable.

I prefer to use fixed widths because we are just not used to wide columns of text, which is why newspapers use columns in the first place.

[tedster]

Note that IE has problems with max-width and min-width. IE6 and earlier don't support it, and IE7 has some nasty bugs in the implementation. But there is hope! You can use IE expressions in the CSS, which allow for a scripted calculation of the maximum or minumum.

IE max-width, min-width -- a not-so-simple solution [webmasterworld.com]

[Xapti]

I am quite sincerely against fixed widths for most stuff. It doesn't take advantage of larger screens, and it's hard to navigate on small screens.
The only lousy thing about fluid design is the technology is pretty damn bad for designing them in many cases. You'd think web standards would have more options implemented by now for fancier fluid design.

[edited by: Xapti at 11:20 pm (utc) on Sep. 19, 2007]