The Daily Network Monitor

Thank you all for the comments on Fixed vs. Fluid Layouts and Browser size. I agree that for a business web site, where the content doesn’t change a thousand times a day, a site with fixed width is easier to manage. Yet, there is something very cool about using fluid positioning on certain elements. I have a friend that works for a museum, and their web site uses some cool and very easy to implement Fluid Positioning: www.pem.org/homepage.

Years ago I built a web site for a specific SEO project - more on this later - for Ziff Davis Media. I relied heavily on the following web site, www.bluerobot.com, which has a lot of great examples on how to implement CSS in many web site scenarios. What’s great is that this site provides the code for you! This was my go to site when I was learning CSS positioning!

OK, the SEO project mentioned above included creating absolute positioned div tags in a relative positioned div wrapper. The point of this project was to get the most important search engine friendly content at the top of the HTML code page, while the content that you see in the browser is positioned somewhere in the middle of the page. Essentially, we wanted to “trick” search engines.

We contemplated doing the same thing for www.whatsupgold.com, but I’ve talked to at least one SEO expert that suggested this type of practice yields little to no advantage to all the trouble that it’s worth.

Comments by web developers and SEO gurus would be greatly appreciated, and look for the new site on May 6th.

I am a web master for www.whatsupgold.com, a site where we let users try, buy, and learn more about the popular network management software. Our main audience are Network Administrators, their bosses, and other IT Folks.

I want to poll other web designers and web developers on how they prefer to layout their web sites. We are in the process of launching a new site in early May that will be wider than the current site (optimized for 1024 x 768, versus the current 800 x 600), but will still include a fixed width layout. I decided to go with the fixed width for a few reasons, with the primary reason being - HTML pages are easier to manage.

What have others found as the main advantages/disadvantages of creating a site with fixed as opposed to liquid width?

Are most web geeks-masters-gods moving to a 1024 x 768 or higher resolution? In our research, we found that 99+% of our audience uses 1024 x 768 or HIGHER screen resolution, hence the switch to the higher resolution.

Therefore, I am using a fixed width of 960 pixels. I chose 960 since it is easily divisible by 3, 4, etc., and it easily fits in a browser width of 1024 with room to spare.

Your comments are most certainly welcome.