For too long I've had my blog main column set to "Fluid" which isn't ideal for predictable design or layout. This was because:
- I'm lazy
- I didn't have the custom code to adjust it to anything other than the 300,400,500 pixel fixed widths or Fluid settings in the TypePad template I use. I suspect that was designed around 800 pixel screens but who uses them any more?
- See 1.
500 was too narrow for me so "Fluid" it was. It was OK for most but on really wide screens some posts "fluided" to a very long single line!
Today I was given the CSS code and since few, actually 1.57%, use 800 wide screens I've settled on a fixed 1100 pixel overall width. The most common size is 1280x1024. That's lower than I'd have guessed and I was also interested to see IE/Windows still dominates visits. Not what I'd expect on a "techie blog".
I've actually always sized my images to work at 500px, thus the extensive use of thumbnails, but if you encounter any readability problems with this new layout leave a comment. The only problem I foresee is the demand for even wider, thin images to use on the wider banner image I haven't done yet!