Are fluid websites worth making anymore?

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

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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.

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:

1. Text is hard(er) to read when lines are very long.
2. Your audience may have larger or smaller resolutions than normal, and picking an 'incorrect' static width will annoy them.
3. 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.

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.

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.

The most important thing is to consider dominant use cases of your web site or application. Do you expect people to use it exclusively on mobile devices? Mobile phones, netbooks, desktops?

Take a look at "Responsive Web Design" by Ethan Marcotte: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/

Great article that demonstrates the use of truly fluid layouts using media-queries. Sometimes you need to built out a separate front end for different user-agents, but sometimes media-queries are the perfect tool to service multiple resolutions across different user-agents.

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.

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.

Up to a point - yes.

There's a certain width, where text begins to become annoying to read if it's too wide. Easy to test if you have a large monitor, just grab notepad and paste some text into it without line breaks.

However, when going down to smaller sizes, being fluid might be a good idea. Mobile phone browsers are more and more capable of displaying "normal" websites just fine, but they are sometimes width-constrained, and as such, benefit if your site can fit in a bit smaller space.

Personally I also like to keep browser on my monitor but only at half of the monitor's width (24"). Sites which scale nicely into that are very good.

I think it's mostly a user convenience case. Not all sites will benefit from being fluid, but I think sites which have lots of text content are the ones that will most benefit from it, at least if they are fluid up to a max width (say 800px or whatever)

Yes. Page zooming is great but it is primarily used to make text bigger, not to make text fill the viewport. Certainly if the body text is already too wide, zooming down to make it fit will usually make it unreadable.

You need liquid layout if you're going to make the text fit the viewport whether or not it's zoomed.

The point about ‘long lines being hard to read’ is often overstated by designers trying to justify fixed width designs(*), but in reality it doesn't seem to hold quite as strongly on-screen as it did on paper. Of course setting a good leading/line-height is important, and max-width can be used to inhibit the worst excesses of long lines. (Set it in font-relative em units.) You don't get max-width in IE6, but that's not the disaster it once was. (You can fix it with a little bit of JavaScript if you really care about those guys. I don't.)

(* which are indeed less work for highly graphical layouts. But for a simpler layout like, er, StackOverflow's, there isn't really any reason not to go liquid. Tsk @SO, eh!)

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.

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 .. :)

I think the decision fluid/fixed should be based also on content of the website:

1. For sites with big amounts of plain information (like news portals), better to use fluid layout.

2. Web-services better look and work in fixed dimensions, so you always know where interface elements are located in their places and they are not moving around constantly.

Yes, fluid websites are worth creating
As you said, it looks good and reasonable when you plan properly at design phase.

Your doubt about the impact of Ctrl + Scrollbar is not a big deal. This feature is primarily for accessibility, to make text more readable by increasing the size.

However, if you mention all your sizes in Pixels (px) it won't happen. Proper adjustment happens only when you use "em" to specify size. So you have a way to turn it on/off

I'm a big fan of fixed at < 800px... it's easier to read narrower columns, and it will work anywhere. That is, if you're trying to make a website that presents hypertext... Websites which present application front-ends, are I think another can of worms entirely...

Fluid design - truly fluid - is hard. Very hard. It's not just a question of page width - do your fonts scale, and does everything scale with them? Ideally:

• Sizes should be defined in em rather than px
• ...and that goes for element sizes, not just fonts!
• Given a change in font size or zoom level, the page elements should be the same size relative to each other

Our main product is fluid, and it's a pain from my point of view as a designer, especially because it involves a lot of user-generated content.

For one thing, images - in a fixed-width site, you can have an image that fills half the width, and looks great. In a fluid site, this image is just as likely to be lost in a sea of whitespace, looking rather lonely.

Life should be easier once border-radius and other CSS3 properties come into play more, but sadly our core audience are government workers, who all, ALL STILL USE IE F@!*ING 6!

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To answer the question, "is it worth it"? Yes, if you do it right.

Here's a scenario: choose a fixed-width site: your boss displays it to a client on his brand-new, 1920x1600 laptop, then complains to you about "how it all looks small on this guy's screen!"

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.

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.

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.