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Using colorselections.com templates to design a website. Some templates can be both fixed or fluid, some can be only one or the other. Pros and cons of each seem to be pretty much equal, so it comes down to preference. New to design, so I'd like to hear what any of you with design experience prefer.
Neither, you need to make your website responsive which is like fluid on steroids. Responsive has come about because of so many people using phones and sall devices. The website adapts to the screensize/type of device. Filler content may disappear on smaller screens, for example on a forum you may have the views and reply and last post listed for a post in the topic list *poof, gone*. Content will change positions or alter itself, a horizontal menu on the top of the content becomes vertical and drops below the content. Font sizes will change....
FYI, look into Drupal for building and managing a web site. There is little bit of a learning curve but you'll be glad you took the time to learn because Drupal opens an unlimited amount of doors and possibilities.
Before coming here to ask about preferences, I did some quick research because, frankly, I had no idea what "fixed" and "fluid" were. The only "design" (using this term very loosely) experience I've ever had was way back in the late 90s with AOL's Hometown.
My hands are tied with most choices. I'm volunteering to help a group with the process of moving from one web host to another. (It's a real hoot that I'm the one with the most experience ... ha!)
The host choice isn't changeable - very limited options because there has to be integration with special accounting software. The set-up charge is a $100 flat fee if we use colorselections.com's pre-designed templates. They can do custom designs, but it's $85/hour which far and away exceeds the budget.
I only have the two choices with these pre-designed templates - fixed or fluid. Neither adaptive nor responsive are options unless we get into the expensive custom designs.
Although the website we have now, and the new one, is public, it's of little interest to the outside world. Essentially it's just the 300+- group members who visit it. But even so, I of course want it to be as user-friendly as possible for the group. I haven't done a formal survey to ask about which devices members usually use, but I'm guessing that at least half (if not more) use smart phones only, a good portion use phones and/or tablets along with their laptops and desktops, and a decent-sized amount use only laptops and desktops.
As the "webmaster" managing content, I use a desktop with an older 17" monitor. Selfishly I want to make life easy for me so that what I see is how others will see it ... or at least some semblance of WYSIWYG. Confined to fixed or fluid, I don't see how that's possible, so I'm trying to figure out which is the lesser evil.
"Fluid" might be a term they are using to mean Responsive maybe? It's hard to believe anyone selling or hosting templates wouldn't have a responsive group.
"Fluid" might be a term they are using to mean Responsive maybe? It's hard to believe anyone selling or hosting templates wouldn't have a responsive group.
It may be that the "only" choices shown to clients are fixed and fluid, but that their "fluid" is actually more intuitive of devices (ie responsive) from the designers'/programmers' point of view. Maybe they do stick in some CSS queries and tailor the site appearances based on browser sizes. So, it could be that they say "choose fixed or fluid" in an attempt to make it look like a simple choice to novices such as me.
I've been playing with demos today of the pre-designed templates, and it's been interesting to compare how they look and function on my 17" monitor and on my iPad. One fluid design that has horizontal tabs for the menu choices looked different depending on the device - one of the tabs became misaligned on the iPad.
Our current website is apparently fluid (or responsive?) with some sort of max width set because I compared it on a 24" high-res monitor (did not stretch across the whole monitor), 17" older monitor (filled the screen), iPad (filled the screen in portrait and landscape), and iPhone (squished itself to fit in portrait, filled the screen in landscape). The layouts (text wrapping, graphic placements) didn't change regardless of the device -- that's a good thing, and I hope the new site will behave in the same way.
Thank you for this example! (also because I found I had to explore the site as well as play with its size because we're headed to a bunch of different national parks next summer :-)
I just spent a few minutes opening some random sites from my bookmarks, and changing the size of my browser window.
Take city-data.com for example. Using my 17" monitor, as I shrink my browser, the top box (with the thread path and my info) adapts to the shrinkage, but this box I'm typing in does not. Instead, a bottom scroll bar appears at a certain point below 50%. On my iPad the site fits nicely in both portrait and landscape. I don't know how it appears on a larger high-res monitor nor on a smart phone.
So, based on what I'm learning, city-data is not fixed, is not responsive (at least not like your example) - is it therefore fluid or adaptive?
CD is example of a fluid design which again has similar characteristics to responsive, it uses percentages in some places for some widths but this has limitations. For example if you go to topic lists and resize the browser, it gets crowded.
How a responsive design would react is to hide the last post, views and replies column because that content is not very relevant. You can see an example here on phpBB forums.
As another example suppose you have tabbed menu on the top of your content with 4 tabs and each tab is set to 25% for large screens. When the screen sizes reaches X you could make them 50% so now you have a square with 4 boxes. As the screen resolution drops even lower they could be 100%. You could also be increasing the font sizes.....
That is what sets fluid and and responsive apart, there will be different CSS rules.
One other thing to add you can take this even further and only send to the browser what is needed. For example if you an image gallery of thumbs instead of sending the browser a large image that it is only going to resize smaller you send the browser the correct size.
While on the topic this is also good example of where the "cascading" term for CSS comes in. What is 100%? 100% would be whatever you declared in the parent element, if for example you set default font size for the body that font size will be used for the entire page unless we override it further down in our CSS rules.
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