Fixed or Fluid?
by cindy ~ February 14th, 2006. Filed under: development.A few years ago there were lots of debates going around on the best resolution to design for. Back then 1024×768 was the ‘forward’ compatability, so you could get away with designing a fixed layout to 800×600 fairly comfortably.
About 3months ago I went shopping for my new laptop, and about half the laptops & monitors were larger screen sizes and default higher resolutions 1280+ . A couples of weeks ago I was in the computer retailers again, and the number of large, widescreen & high resolutions ‘out of the box’ was about 90% of their stock on display. I got a 17″ widescreen which was 1920x default.
The main thing that hit me straight away was “oh my, all that wasted space!” Layouts catering to 800×600 look more like business cards more than websites.
As much as I fight with them, I would have to say that designers are going to have to start looking at using fluid design more often to be forward comaptable. It shouldn’t matter that ‘those in the know’ know how to reduce their resolutions out of the box, or that others use small windows on the larger res & screen size. The point is… these larger res. & screen sizes seem to be dominating the retail market now… so there will be many new users seeing ‘business card’ size sites.
So it would seem logical that fluid designs are the way to go.
Which is where I am now with new templates… just how bloody hard is it to have a layout & design that looks good on a 1920x resolution & widescreen…. and also looks good & functions on a 600x ! So I have decided that I will only be making mine function down to 800x now, and providing a link for smaller resolutions & screen sizes (excluding mobile layouts).
I also found that by putting more into the design of the page, rather than relying on graphics, that pages are getting easier to manipulate. I have a couple of sites that still have visual impact but rely on 1 or 2 images. Unfortunately with IE it can involve a lot of nested containers (I wonder if IE7 is going to be able to count any better than IE6! 
IF not… I am leading a revolution against IE! ).
So I am interested to see how many are sticking with fixed layouts in comparison to fluid now. (and how much hair you lose in the process! )
