Hi all
My main div for my site is width=950px; do I have to make it liquid or something? Thanks
I have static pages with width of 1050px, so far no problems with that
Depends on what result you want. If your site is a fixed width, visitors with wide-screen monitors will still see only 950px of content, either centered (if you’ve set margin: 0 auto; for your div) or left-justified. Visitors with little netbooks will have to scroll right and left to see everything.
Thanks for the replies, I have moved on from the old 770px wide sites and now I am just thinking if i put the information it is essential for them to see on the left hand side of the page they will see it anyway regardless of what monitor type they have*. But maybe I have been brainwashed by my designer and should sort out the design to be 770px. What is the width in px for netbooks? Thanks
- Do I need to worry about this for ipads etc
Even 940px is pretty narrow for most monitors today. There are simple ways to make a site more fluid/elastic, such that if the site is seen in a narrow browser, it will thin down by itself. E.g. set the width of the container in ems, and give the container a max-width like 98%, and it will narrow on narrower browsers.
How do you know there are no problems? The problems won’t be for you, they will be for the people trying to use your site. And if they struggle using it, they’re far more likely to give up and go elsewhere than tell you your site’s broken.
Limiting your site to 770px isn’t the best solution, because it can look quite narrow on larger screens. In an ideal world, you’d have a flexible design that would stretch to at least 1000px, and shrink to 750px or less, to best fit the user’s browser window. That way, pretty much everyone is happy.
Yes, you do need to take account of smaller devices. On my own site, nearly 10% of all users are on mobile phones or similar. While most ‘full browser’ phones have quite a good pan-and-zoom function, the wide the page, the harder it is to use effectively, if you have to keep scrolling left and right. So again, allowing the page to shrink to <800px will help people there.
Basically, know your audience. Collect browser stats for visitors, then figure out who you’re catering for and what screen resolutions. Then you’ll be able to decide what resolutions to support. You don’t have to support everyone, particularly if it’s a personal site, but if, say, 10% are on mobile devices, you’d be making a mistake not supporting them. Likewise, if 10% are on large screen devices, an 800px layout is going to look terrible.
There are ways of getting around this. Build a responsive, flexible layout to cover a range of sizes, or use wider backgrounds to fill larger screens, and so on.
iPads and etc you simply double tap and the text fills the screen with a little buffer on the sides. Double tap again and it zooms back out. Virtually any size site is not a problem at all for those devices.
There’s also an element of “user expectations” to consider. At home, I’m looking at sites on a 1680x1050 monitor. Sites that are still geared to 800x600 monitors are really ugly - I feel as if I’m looking at things through vertical blinds.
When I travel, I take a little netbook with me. Even that, however, manages to give me 1024x600 - the lack of height ends up being more noticeable than the lack of width. But frankly, I don’t expect sites to cater to that little display. I know that making things fluid enough to handle that small size is really, really difficult. As long as I can still get to everything on the page, I’m happy enough.