What Is Fixed and Fluid Website Design and Which One to Cho…
Website design is very vast field and consisting of various different methods and technologies to design the website. In recent years, fixed and fluid web design approaches are in most demand and also cause lots of debt on which one is better and which one to choose. In this article, I tried to elaborate the fixed and fluid design in brief and also try to list out benefits of each of them to help you decide which one to choose for your website design.
What is fixed design for website?
Fixed design is nothing but professional approach in which designer need to define the width on page regardless of size of the browser window. Few examples of fixed design include some of the popular websites like Yahoo, CNN and Helium. Fixed layout basically consistans of text, images, containers, and all the other graphic elements defined in pixels.
Benefits of using Fixed design:
• Main benefit that designers can get from fixed design is well-controlled design of website. In other words, designers have total authority to make any changes or modifications within design without any problem.
• Website using fixed layouts can be easily viewable in a variety of mobile devices, tablets and PDAs too. The website is highly compatible with any of the media device and can run smoothly on any devices, which is major benefit of this type of designs.
• It empowers the designer to get more control over the contents of the website.
• It is easy to incorporate various stunning background images within website as you have authority to define the size of the page.
Drawbacks:
• Even if users have larger screen resolutions and space, they will only see fixed width website. This at the end waste remaining screen space. This will provide poor browsing experience to the users.
• Users having smaller screen may not able to see the website properly.
Fluid design:
It empowers users to choose how the web page is going to look on the basis of browser window and other display settings. Google, Wikipedia etc. are the examples of fluid design.
Benefits of using fluid layout:
• Main benefit of using it is it can utilize all the available space.
• It gives total power in user's hand, as they can choose how the website will look.
Drawbacks:
• If the screen size is large then the website will look very weird.
• It will become very difficult to use background images with fluid design.
So, above we see in-depth about fixed and fluid design layouts. The choice is entirely based on the purpose and requirement of the website you are going to design.
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