Are fluid websites worth making anymore? [closed]
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?
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
Static Examples:
Apple
eBay
MSN
StackOverflow
MSDN
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.
Making a website fluid, but adding a min/max-width attribute seems to be the best of both worlds, for me. You support fluidity, but you limit it at a certain width (say, 800px and 1200px).
It is up to you - here are some things to consider:
- Text is hard(er) to read when lines are very long.
- Your audience may have larger or smaller resolutions than normal, and picking an 'incorrect' static width will annoy them.
- Maintaining a fluid site can be, but doesn't have to be much more difficult than its static counterpart.
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.
You have to realize most computer users don't even KNOW HOW to zoom in the browser! Most users are so far from the understanding of computers that we have. We always have to remember that fact.