Recently I was appointed president of Iranian Cultural Club at Purdue University. One of the things I had planned was changing the club’s website to make it more functional and user friendly. I have the new design up and running now.

Fixed width design has been my choice for most of my better websites. In one of my previous posts, I explained why fixed width is better than fluid width in most cases.

I divided the homepage up into smaller boxes to give each box topic more importance and make it easier for the viewers to read. I personally don’t like to read long lines that go across the whole page.

I put random pictures on every page. The whole goal of the website is to represent the Iranian Club and get others involved and pictures are a good way to create interest in potential new members.

For the picture gallery section I used Jalbum software. It is easy to use and doesn’t require database. I simply created the album on my computer and uploaded the whole thing online as a web album – no coding involved. The only downside is that the gallery’s design doesn’t match the rest of the website’s design.

I will in future add a feed to it that would be updated for every event and meeting that we have. I’m not sure how to actually do that, so I will have to read about it and learn. I will also write a post about it here too.

A better approach might be adding a blog to it, but blog requires installing and database use which I’m not sure if the University allows.

Deciding whether to make your website’s design fixed width or fluid width is the issue many of us think about every time we start a new website or change a current website’s design. Not only this bugs us all the time, if we go with fixed width , we have to decide what width we actually want to go with.

In short, I have experienced that as I develop my websites further and upgrade them I tend to change the designs to fixed width. I still have websites with fluid width (Cancer Forums), but all of my better websites are fixed width.

Fixed width allows you to better manage the elements of design and therefore have less un-used or wrongly used spaces as the resolution of the visitor’s monitor changes. When designing for fluid width, you usually have to design such that smaller monitors (ex. 1024) can still view the whole page without scrolling sideways. So why not just make a fixed width that shows the same page to everyone?

Fixed width can also give your website more credibility as it has a consistent look every time the visitor goes on it (and the fact that the elements of design are more organized). So if your website is an e-commerce site, I definitely suggest using a fixed width.

Fluid width can still be good for Forums as more space is always useful when reading posts and threads. Also there are usually not much design elements in the forums body. The graphics are usually in the header and/or footer only.

Deciding on the actual width of the design is tricky as well. I tend to make my designs 980px wide. I don’t try to make the site fit in 800×600 resolutions monitors anymore.Firstly there are very few of those left and people who do use them are usually older people still using their 10 year old PC which are not my targeted audience.

I tend to adjust my sites to 1024×768 resolutions. I actually go for 980px to leave some spaces for the side up and down scrolls.