You might not have noticed if you are not using a wide screen monitor, but I have changed this theme to become a totally fixed width theme. Previously, the header and the footer were fluid and only the content area was fixed at 910 pixels. It looks okay on a normal computer screen, but when seen through a wide screen monitor, it looks kind of odd with the header and the footer stretched fully across the screen and the contents stucked in the middle.
I don’t actually see the logic behind this. If it is going to be fixed width theme, make it totally fixed width so it looks like a complete page. If it is fluid width, why then keep the contents fixed and not make it fluid altogether. Ahh.. there is a reason behind this.
Research done by the news media some years ago by news companies who uses the traditional style where when you fully open a newspaper, it spans roughly 3 feet across. They discovered that they are loosing readers to companies that publish their papers in tabloid form, reason being, holding up and reading these traditionally styled newspapers proved to be quite tedious and tiring. Eventually the old style newspapers were slowly phased out and replaced with tabloids.
The same goes for Blog Themes. Before the arrival of wide screen monitors, a fluid theme is deemed perfect because at that time, the biggest CRT monitors were the 17 inch or the 19 inch squarish looking monitors. A fluid Theme fits perfectly into these monitors and the themes looks like a whole complete theme with no wastage of screen estate.
However, with the gaining popularity of wide screen LCD monitors, these fluid themes lost its initial purpose. If you have seen a blog with a fluid theme on a 19 inch or a 24 inch wide screen monitor, you will find that reading their contents is terribly “eye catching” Your eyeballs or maybe even your head, will have to travel from left to right like as though you are watching a tennis match and you don’t want to miss where the ball is heading. After the third or fourth sentence, you will find that you have missed a line or two simply because of the sheer length of the words that are stretched across the monitor. Sometimes when a paragraph is a short one, it looks like one complete sentence across the screen.
The most basic requirement of a well designed blog theme is the ability to capture the readers attention when they are reading our blogs. A fluid theme in this case is repulsive. The most appropriate theme are themes that are fixed at 900 pixels to 1000 pixels wide. These themes have enough room to accommodate the popular 3 column comfortably and it fits perfectly into a 17 inch or 19 inch CRT monitor. When viewed on a wide scree, it looks pleasant and elegant like as though they are reading a page from a magazine.
Well, that is why a well planned layout (theme or template) is very crucial to any blog or commercial website. By planning ahead of what is required, we understand better how to take advantage of fluid layouts.
For example; if you had a portal packed with loads of information then having a fluid layout is a benefit. Especially if the information is broken down into several columns.
For blogs, a fixed layout normally works well enough. Besides, it was born with only 2-columns.
But fluid can get out of hand. If you have a 30″ monitor or LCD TV then it’ll stretch too far. That is why it should normally be constrained by a max-width.
Ultimately, it’s all about planning and understanding before executing…especially to me and Simpleet.
This posts of yours really opened my mind on this. Last time when I go on search for a theme, I always wanted a fluid theme, which is very difficult to find by that time.
After switching over to WordPress, I nearly go for a fluid theme but there’s some bug with the theme. At the end, I settled myself with the current fixed theme.
After reading your posts, I guess I am satisfied with what I have now.
I am using a fluid theme and I do disagree with what is being said about fluid themes about not being able to capture the reader’s attention. I have had visitors viewing from resolutions as high as 1900px for the width and there have been no complaints thus far. It is important to actually define how much you want your sidebar to occupy. I always set the content area to have 80% and my sidebar 20% so that there is always a proportion in which users are viewing the site.