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Flexible website layout is a kind of website layout. It is characterized by proportional “stretching” and “compressing” of the sizes of website pages components that adjust according to the user's display resolution. From the moment of its invention flexible website layout has been used quite actively. However, modern web designers think that flexible layout can have quite negative influence on website effectiveness.
Why has flexible website layout appeared? When manufacturers began to offer large and wide monitors, web developers started thinking about websites that would look on old 15-inch CRT displays and on modern 22- or 24-inch liquid crystal displays equally well. It gave rise to flexible layout in contrast to fixed width layout, where all web design elements occupy their places strictly, and their location and size do not change when a user changes the size of his browser window.
Flexible website layout allows to “fill” all browser window area; however, it inevitably causes certain inconvenience.
To read the text from a display is harder and more tiring than to read it from the paper. Flexible website layout aggravates this problem even more, because excessive “stretching” of text blocks of a site often results in exceeding the maximum acceptable text width.
Therefore the text becomes inconvenient for reading – the visitors have to “make a long journey” from the one end of the line to the other over and over again. The eyes get tired much faster than during reading a text block of common width.
Flexible website layout may violate the proportions of website design, even though it is intended for preserving these proportions. However, a lot of elements of web design are far from being capable to be changed proportionally without quality deterioration. We speak first of all about raster graphic images. Such images cannot be “stretched” or “compressed” without quality deterioration.
If flexible website layout does not take into account such peculiarities of images, as well as other elements of website design, during “stretching” one elements may change their proportions, and other will remain in their initial form. As a result, website design ceases to be harmonious, it gets broken.
From the technical point of view, flexible website layout is more complicated than fixed width layout. When you use fixed width layout, there is no need to draw the design layout in several states (for various resolutions), you need not resort to any technical tricks to make the site look well on all displays. Besides, if an inexperienced user fills the site with flexible layout with content, it may result in “breakdown” of website design, whereas fixed width layout will not let such incident happen.
Taking into account the peculiarities of flexible layout, web developers suggest that you should use fixed width layout. However, flexible website layout may be acceptable for a certain category of sites – for example, news portals with minimal graphic design.
TAGS
flexible layout,
flexible website layout,
fluid website layout,
liquid website layout,
website layout,
fixed website layout,
fixed width website layout |
web programming 
