One of the tough decisions for web designers is about flow the layout. Should it be fixed or liquid? Wait, there is also elastic! You can also choose hybrid layout which can be a combination of any of these. Of course, there is always a personal choice, but are there reasons? All these different options have their pros and cons. This discussion has survived the table era and is quite hot in the current CSS era. Each option has been bashed up by the other party. However, it is usually because the opposition considers only the disadvantages, only the things that are difficult with a certain approach. What I see missing is context of the web site. Is it possible to come out with justifications for the disadvantages using the advantages for context of the web site under discussion? Without a web site to consider this discussion is sure to end up in a stalemate. I have not been able to take extreme stands, but I do believe that for a specific web site one can be better than other. Today, we also have the luxury of additional information like the report on actual browser sizes.

I always think that the biggest influence on design decisions is the context which is usually the answer to combination of the questions

• What is the website about?
• Who will use the website?

It is a fact of life that you can never expect to normalize resolutions and browsers among the users. And this variety leads to a range of real estate available for a web page to use. The question of which layout to use boils down to need to optimally use the available real estate. However this comes up with giving up a bit of control on the design. Rather, that how the web page will look now depends not only on your design, but also on the user environment.

This is one of the issues where you might never be able to decide affirmatively. It can come out of a jugglery of various factors like the time, the effort, the cost and of course the requirements. Over time I have come up with my own way of trying to decide which one to use, they are listed here, not in any particular order:

• I usually consider the amount of information that has to be shown in a context. If the information tends to be on an increasing side, I tend towards the liquid or elastic layout. If it can be contained then a fixed layout might work.
• If it is a graphically oriented site, then I tend to go for the fixed width. It is not that the liquid layouts do not work, just that it gets more difficult to design. Of course, as a challenge it is one thing, but from the project’s perspective I tend to move from “Why not liquid” to “Why liquid”.
• The biggest disadvantage of the fixed width layout is that there is no single fixed width for all devices. So, if it is possible that the website readers are going to use various devices, then liquid layouts might help.

Designing liquid layouts cannot be said to be more difficult, but there are more precautions to take. More flexibility requires more attention! There are usability standards for length of readable text line. If proper care is not taken this can lead to designs difficult to read. There is also a possibility that, if the widths are not properly assigned, the design might differ a lot across various resolutions.

This is an issue where there cannot be recommendations or a single definitive answer. We will, or at least I will, always only tend to support one over the other. In such cases, it has been beneficial for me to observe as many designs as possible and analyze them in context of the web sites. While I cannot say that these observations have helped me learn, they have definitely helped in improving my judgements. What have been your experiences? How do you take these decisions? Which layouts do you prefer, both as a designer and a user?

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