Fluid or Fixed Width

Hi all. I'm a web designer and I create free Wordpress themes. I just want to hear your opinions, which one you think is better and preferable by the users ? Design with fluid width or fixed width? I really appreciate your feedbacks

I like fixed width more since that's the style I like. But depending on the design and purpose u can go with fluid. ^^

Flexible fluid width's are the way to go, as you can see on Artician. It does however put a lot of extra stress on the designer to make sure all things work and look just as good from 1024px - 1600px, which is no easy task. Certainly is harder to manage and work with. But it really lets the users take advantage of their larger resolution

Yeah that was the reason I said Fluid is good, if you just gong to do it as portfolio or small site. Fixed!!

Eric, I saw that just now. My laptop is 1024 so I used my friend's which is wider. Danny, I quite agree with you to go for fixed for small sites. I used fluid width for my studio and fixed width over at my blog.

Your designs look fine on both my 1024 screen and my 1680. Same with artician eric so great job you guys!

yeah I am on a much higher res now so looks better (artician and flex width). A fix site will look different but yeah is a smaller one XD

I suppose it depends on a function of a website. Mostly I prefer fixed width.

I prefer fixed width, because that way I can make the website much more graphical. My backgrounds often are large enough, user with an high-res don't have an advantage, but there is something nice for them to look at.

* edit: :$ seems this topic was quite old allready, sorry guys *

I tend to built my sites with a fixed width as well, Fluid is probably the best way to go but as of yet I haven't tried building a layout that way I think it may be down to me using a lot of floats for layouts and fluid could possibly create a few problems with it.

Back in the day I was, aparently, the only using 1280x1024 it sucked to see a website 800px width... too many screen wasted screen space...

I tend to see fluid layouts easier to create for small sites. Depends on the layout though.

I chose to keep Artician userpages fixed width due to their extreme ability to customize. Because of the fact the user will be playing with many different options, it is a lot easier to break a fluid design than a fixed one. Also, when customizing, we would put a lot of extra work on the user. We wanted to keep it clean and simple.

@peeke - That's okay, old topics are okay somtimes

Fluid.. For sure. Developing a site with flash fluid can make things even more graphical that fixed sizes as you can change graph elements positions, apply proportions contraints or not, fix a maximum size or not...
Moreother, resolution issues according to screen it just past with this solution

Depends on the site..
I enjoy sites which are fluid, but when I develop I tend to stick to fixed width 'cause it's just how I flow.

Agreed. I stick with fixed width because of the flexibility of it. I used to do a lot of fluid design, but it felt too limiting.

Fluid is fantastic for large scale websites, with volumes of content everywhere. You also have to look at the target audience, if you target people who do a lot of PC gaming then they usually have massive screens, and it is best to design while keeping that in mind.

A bit of research can go a long way.

It depends on how much content you want to fit in on the website. If it's a personal blog with weekly updates, I'd go with a fixed one. A little easier to read, because shorter lines of text.

If it's a frequently updated, professional blog, I'd definitely go with a fluid 3-column layout, to add space for a tags & category section, ads, friends and so on.

I agree with you ryum. You cannot do just fluid designs or fixed. This depends 100% of your site content and why not, your creativity. Also try, fixed fluid make use of max-width and min-width.

Fixed width, in my opinion are easier to design and to code, but they also look better. That doesn't mean that fluid widths can't look just as good though.