Are fluid websites worth making anymore? [closed]

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

Preface: Not a professional web artist.

I've found that there's way too many fiddly bits to get things to flow just so at cell-phone and uber-widescreen sizes, especially in anything of reasonably interesting complexity.

Typically, I design around having a fixed-width site in some fashion; usually bounded at [600,1200].

I also find super-wide columns of content to be a hassle to read. I seem to remember that there's some research which suggests an optimal number of words per column line.

Answer 3

I think it's nice to be able to scale well on a user's screen, rather than make the users pan and zoom. In a time when users surf the web from such a wide variety of devices, ranging from smartphones to ultra-mobile PCs, each with its own, possibly non-standard resolution, I think it's important to keep user-experience at a high level when your site is viewed on such screens. Regarding the text length, it could be bounded by a certain ratio, so it would fit nicely within the layout. I think there are also frameworks that may help with writing a site in a fluid manner, and help with coding maintainability.

Answer 4

It depends on what you're trying to do. Take a look at SO. It's fixed width and it's great. In fact, if it were fluid, it would be a bit of a PITA. Some sites look better with fluid layouts, but personally, I'd go with fixed unless you have a good reason to go fluid.

Answer 5

I'm gonna go against the majority and say NO. Reasoning: fluid sites like Wikipedia are a nightmare to read on large screens due to their long line length (though its citations make it hard to read at the best of times).

The problem really occurs because there is no mechanism to size text relative to the screen resolution. If you could automatically make text bigger on bigger resolutions, you could stay closer to the 80-odd characters per line that's generally regarded as the best for readability.

There is also the problem of images and other fixed-size elements. You can have large images and let the browser shrink them if necessary, but then you run into other problems like much longer download times, and image quality problems in many browsers.

Answer 6

You can make it like this.

# Make the main layout fluid and apply 'max-width: 1140px' to it and center it.

By this there won't be 'long lines' of text on bigger screens and proper settlement of web page on smaller ones (excluding 800x*** and lowers).

I have implemented this method in my new projects and it's working like a charm.

a.t.b .. :)