Hi All,

A friend and I are currently upgrading the theme used on a site of ours, and we have come to a bit of a hiccup in the design process. We both agree that a 3 column theme will suit our needs best, and my friend is very much in favour of having a dynamic width theme, yet I must say I am a bit of a fence sitter on the issue. Although the fact we are wanting a three column theme is leaning me towards a dynamic width theme as otherwise the center section will be getting a little on the cramped side. Another thing leaning me towards a dynamic width theme, or a fixed width theme optimised for resolution widths of 1024 pixels is that even though visitors using screen resolutions of 800 x 600 currently account for about 7% of our traffic, this number is dropping at around .2% per month for the last 9 months.

I can see that having a fixed width theme enables you to garantee content layout, as someone viewing on a 800 x 600 screen is going to see the same as a person viewing at 1600 x 1200. Likewise I can also very much see the that using a dynamic theme allows you to fill out the entire screen and make full use of the available real estate, however there can be some negative scaling effects at the extremes at either end.

Just wondering what everyone else though on this matter?

My personal preferance is dynamic themes... but it seems more and more sites are using fixed width these days.

I think there is good logic in fixed width, making the site look the same under any resolution.

My very personal opinion is towards dynamic-width themes.

I have not paid good hard-earned money on a computer and display capable of running 1280x1024 to browse websites that only use half or two thirds of the screen

I use a 1600 x 1200 TFT screen, however I rarely view webpages in full screen. 1024 resolution is reasonable with todays technology. Anyone with 800 resolution (IMHO) needs new equipment, unless they like looking through a letterbox and enjoy seeing every pixel. A three column XOOPS site 0n 800 looks pretty cramped, unless specifically desiged for this. But then it looks weird when stretched out on big resolutions.

You content will play a part in your design. Minimalist content looks better on small screens, while a busy site like this can look very crowded.

well richard i need equipment.

I like the way Mozilla is handling this, see http://www.mozilla.org

You can resize it to fit in the screen on small resolutions. But the max. width is about 1000px. And thats pretty good. If you create wider pages it's very hard to keep them readable.

Normally you should not have more than 70 chars in a line for good readability.

over 50% of my visitors are at 1024x768

Fixed is the way I go 90% of the time.

It just works better for me.

I tried my site Out of the Box Solutions, Inc. as a dynamic width. Yuck!

I think the fixed width looks more professional for some reason. I also there are better ways to do a fixed width than liek my site above. Apple has a full page header, but the content is fixed width. This gives the appearance of full page but the benefits of fixed.

Someone above mentioned Mozilla.org. That is also a great balance.

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3 edits on 1 line of post ... maybe you do need new equipment

No seriously, I thought better of that comment. Up to recently 800x600 was still the most popular resolution. There is a joke somewhere about this and a gynachologist, but I dont remember it ...