Are fluid websites worth making anymore? [closed]

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

Text based apps: No. Table based apps: Yes.

Pros of fluid layouts

1. People with big monitors gets to use their screen real estate.
2. Easier for users with big monitors when you have a lot of information on your page.

Cons of fluid layouts:

1. 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.
2. (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.

Answer 3

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

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Static Examples:

Apple

eBay

MSN

StackOverflow

MSDN

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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.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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.