Thinking About… Page Width
Posted: Sat 25 February, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Own Business, Thinking About..., Web Development, Work-related |3 Comments »In what I suspect may just turn out to be a theme on this stuff, page-widths are quite a bone of contention among web designers.
Basically there are two schools of thought – fixed-width and fluid . Fixed width is pretty self-explanatory – the page is designed to fit a certain size, say 800 pixels, or 1,000 , or another arbitrary figure. In general this is fine – the BBC does it this way, as does the Guardian, and many many others. It’s probably slightly more “standard” for commercial websites than fluid, but not by all that much.
Fluid, on the other hand, still tends to be used primarily on smaller-size (readership-wise) sites, blogs, that kind of thing. Not that it matters, but it’s also my general preference. Fluid widths fill the window, regardless of the size of that window. It doesn’t matter if it’s 600 pixels or 2,400 – the site expands to fit. D4D™ does it – if you’re lucky enough to have a dual-monitor set-up or similar, expand d4d to the full extent of the screen. Look, no blank space. It’ll shrink right down to about 450-490pixels before things break. That’s why I like fluid – because it doesn’t care whether you’re using a monitor that’s only able to use 800 pixels, or whether you’re all the way up at 2,400 (or more) or anywhere in between.
I suspect that a lot of it, as with colour, comes down to personal taste. The BBC site annoys me because it only uses half the window width I’ve got open. The Guardian annoys me for the same reason. However, people who like fixed-width (and again, I wonder if this is related to book or newspaper page widths being fixed, and thus “normal”) argue that if the text isn’t handle correctly in a fluid layout, it can end up being almost unreadable. And in fact I agree with this on occasion – if you’ve got lots of short paragraphs, they can look bloody awful in a fluid layout.
I suspect that the sites I’m currently working on will end up being fluid layouts – I’d rather see the space used for site content, instead of just being blank, wasted space. There’ll be space within the layout, though – I think that it’s the lack of space that can make a fluid layout feel cramped, and so I’ll be using as much space as I can for it.
We’ll see, when it comes to time to test it all out.
without diving headlong into a debate that has raged for years now I would suggest that the reason the BBC, Guardian et al choose fixed width is becuase it has been proven that content is easier to read in a narrow column. That said there are definite bonuses to having a fluid layout, not least of which being that the site will hold together if the text size or DPI is increased
Ideally, we’d be able to use a bit of JavaScript to calculate, from the width of the main content panel, whether to display it as one column or two. The only downside is that as far as I know, you presently can’t use JavaScript to detect what font size is being used to view the page on the client.
Would people with a 2,400-pixel resolution monitor actually browse with a maximised window? In both my home and work life I struggle with nothing more than a 15inch monitor, but yet I never used maximised windows. So perhaps it’s not such a ‘blank space’ nightmare for big-screen owners – maybe they use the valuable screen real-estate for displaying several windows at once, rather than one big window.