>The advantage is time. Opportunity cost. Whatever you want to term it.
>
You're just constructing a straw-man argument out of nothing. What does
time have to do with anything, we're talking about the end result here.
I wish time wasn't a factor. As it stands, it's my most scarce resource.
Perhaps we're not on the same wavelength when I'm talking about time as I
can't imagine how you could simply dismiss developer time as anything but
crucial.
Secondly, fluid design is quicker anyway. If you start being obsessive
about browser variation pixel-counting, then you're going to be
_really_ slow.
Fluid is faster to create than fixed. However it's faster to create good,
sales-centric fixed design rather than the equivalent fluid, if the latter
is even possible.
In particular, WYSIWYG design is slow. Yes, Dreamweevil is slower than
a crude text-only editor for any site more than a few pages long. The
problem is that WYSIWYG still sees a large site as no more than a
number of pages, and each page as its own design problem. Rather than
marking up the content, setting a site stylesheet and letting the
user's browser do the layout rendering, the WYSIWYG approach is to make
a human designer work over each page in turn. They apply a site style
guide to each page and turn it into one pixel-specific rendering, then
worry about preserving that rendering across platforms. Costly human
interaction on every page, not just once per site.
I handcode everything. I've run a few trials of DW over the years and it's
not a tool for me. I've been playing with MS's new WYSIWYG tool and sort of
like it for spot details, but only really use it after a layout is 95% done
anyhow though. And it still has some novelty value to it, good chance I'll
scrap it once the trial runs out. So I'd tend to agree with you that
handcoding is more efficient than DW and it's kin and never argued
otherwise. However I've been doing this stuff for 10 years or so, as I'm
sure you have as well. For a relatively new designer, or someone who won't
be laying out pages very often, the accelerated learning curve of a WYSIWYG
editor more than compensates for the rather trivial sacrifices found in it's
output code. There's also another set of DW users who seem to have a true
mastery of the program, for whom the program is very much more efficient
than handcoding.
>I'm not worried about a few pixels here and there. If the site isn't
dead-on exact across browsers, doesn't really matter.
Granted. So why are you advocating it?
Dismissing a few pixel difference is not the same as ambivilence towards
page elements being +/- 500px from where I believe these elements will best
perform.
>800px is just about perfect as I can keep a design compact enough to keep
various
eye-cues within range of eachother, yet still present content with enough
width to
entice (hopefully) reading said content while putting vital navigation
alongside.
You have no idea if this is enough, because you have no idea how many
pixels I need to set a character to to be readable for my screen and my
eyes.
I don't care about *you*, or any individual surfer, or any tiny subset of
surfers. I care about conversions. I care about my demographic. You, the
300px PDA surfer, are not my demographic. As such you're best off moving
along to another site that might serve your needs better. I'll go ahead and
pitch my products, and pitch them well, to the next 554 surfers before
another one of you comes along.
I've got a 3200px wide setup and your window isn't interested in
playing with any more than a quarter of that. How can that possibly be
seen as a good thing? Let _me_ set this as the user, not you as the
designer.
If I was working for the IRS and writing a page about filling out tax forms,
you'd have a point. Or any research/education, maybe even
entertainment-based site. Hell, if I was a company designing a part of it's
site dedicated namely to product/customer support, I'd tend to agree with
you. Because the customer is king. The consumer/shopper is NOT. Not until
they're your customer.
How come when I go to a grocery store the household staples (milk, bread,
etc.) I need to buy require me to walk damned near the entire circumfrance
of the store?
How come the 2 liter bottles of Coke are sold on special for 3 @ $4.98, even
though they'll happily sell me one for $1.66? Wouldn't it be more useful
for the shopper to clearly know that the special is actually $1.66 per
bottle? And why are the bottles of Coke between one and 2.5 feet below a
5'6" shopper's eye level anyhow, rather than other rows on the 7 foot tall
shelving? How come the bottle of Pepsi I actually have on my shopping list
is down by my feet?
And why is the sign promoting that Coca Cola special some extravagant,
multi-colored illustration with jagged text that is, frankly, quite hard to
read? Wouldn't some large black serif font on a plain white background be
more pleasing on the eye?
So one day you buy a grocery store, just like the above. It's doing pretty
well as-is, but there are about 25 potential shoppers out of your 10,000
regular customers that find your layout too 'commercial' or confusing and
just don't care for it overall - so they don't come. So you redesign the
layout so the most needed items are consolidated in a convenient region of
the store. You redo the signage to emphasize readability. You mandate a
common price and shelving order, so all prices are shown in the same unit
and all similar products are displayed alphabetically. I'll guarantee you
shoppers to your new grocery store will absolutely love the convenience and
appreciate the new layout, unlike any other stores in the area. Those 25
potential shoppers are now yours as well! And your grocery store will fold
in 6 months in the face of steep competition who know exactly how to trigger
consumer response as opposed to your fantasy-land values of the
most-consumer friendly approach to shopping.
Your obligation as a designer of a commercial site is to drive revenue, NOT
an obligation to please the surfer. The two aren't mutually exclusive -
most scenarios and decisions will find that the choice that best drives
revenue and best pleases the surfer are one in the same. But not always.
And when deciding whether or not to turn over control of your layout to the
surfer or not, you're almost always best siding with keeping as much control
of your layout as possible.
Giving surfers an easy means to view your content as they wish has it's time
and place. But that time and place sure as hell is not on a site designed
to drive new and incremental revenue. Seriously, do you think Expedia
spends $50 million annually driving visitors to it's site without *knowing*
it's fixed-800px layout flush on the left sidebar isn't the correct choice
for it's product? Or BestBuy.com Or Walmart.com Or IBM.com. And on and
on. Do you honestly think these guys haven't tested and re-tested dozens of
layouts, fluid and fixed, to determine what will best produce shareholder
value and market share? Are their designers just not smart enough to see
the light?
Off the top of my head I can only think of three large commercial sites
that use fluid layouts - Amazon, Ebay and NewEgg. Ebay's almost more a
portal, so I'm hesitant to even include them. Amazon displays such a
mindboggling amount of content on each page I can actually see it makes
sense for them to go fluid (though it 'breaks' at sub-800). And NewEgg
caters so heavily to the high-tech it'll likely to be viewing on
mega-resolution screens I can see it's logic as well (though it too will
break at sub-800px). Certainly there's more large fluid sites than that,
but fluid is the exception - for a reason.
>What you term "sloppy" is irrelevant. All things being equal, 'clean'
code
is preferred over 'sloppy' code. But 99.5%+ of your audience really
doesn't
care.
They care what it looks like, even if they don't now why. They care if
text spills over an image.
That would be an error in coding, not an error related to fixed vs. fluid,
or css vs table, or valid vs. non-validating code.
They care if it's unreadably large or
unreadably small, for them, that day.
Same 'ole, same 'ole. I'll risk the shot a fractional % of my audience for a
better presentation to the overwhelming majority.
>If you can whip out a "sloppy" page in two hours using DW versus 4
hours handcoding validating markup,
Production time of hand-coding over DW on typical sites is about 4
times faster (for typical sites of the scale I work on). It's not that
the work is easier, it's that you don't repeat the same work on every
page
On one of my sites last year, a hand-code approach into the crappiest
text-editor window you've ever seen and then an XSLT and CSS-based CMS
was running at _60_times_ faster than the old site technique of using
DW on each page.
Again, you'll get no argument from me about DW. I'm not a fan but there are
very valid reasons many use it.
>The overwhelming majority of
your audience uses browsers than can compensate for imperfect markup
Would you be so ready to dismiss $5k short-notice business-class air
travel?
If I really believed there was an economic model for cell/PDA surfers at
my
company (which I don't, but that's not to say it'll always be the case)
I'd
develop a WAP site or whatever for it.
What's a WAP site grandad, and why has anyone since 2001 cared ?
WAP and WML died on its arse, closely followed by the whole
walled-garden concept for mobile webs. Now the market is about how you
make your existing sites and pages usable through mobiles, when you
don't even recognise that they _are_ mobiles.
Archaic or not, WML seems to do the rare cellphone jobs I need done...
reliably and efficiently to boot!
My sites already work like this, yours don't. I'm eating your lunch.
I highly doubt whatever fraction of a percent of mobile users having access
to my site could ever compensate for designing to a lowest common
denominator. In my case, at least. A local search service or something
similar... then you might be on to something.
>W3 bitching you have a <ptag without a closing version.
Why would the W3 bitch about that anyway? HTML is an SGML application,
elements close themselves perfectly adequately (if you do close with a
</p>, that's for the human coder's clarity benefit as much as
anything).
If you think this is what HTML validation is about, let alone what
fluid design is about, then you're still at a level of ignorance where
you're not really in a position to judge their benefits.
Perhaps.
I might counter that, while I believe you do have a very strong technical
foundation, you seem to have a truly naive understanding of sales and
marketing and the consumer versus the customer - more akin to what a new
employee at a Walmart is spoon-fed rather than real-world understanding of
the subject.
>If you can detail 99% of a product in 5 paragraphs or 70% of the same
product in 5 bullet points or 5 sentences,
[sub-Nielsen trivia deleted]
So what? You've read Tom Peters and a few other airport books. Big
deal.
Now tell me again, what does this have to do with design, in terms of
the fixed vs. fluid debate ?
It doesn't. That was in reference to a "content is king" fallacy someone
was pitching. In case you haven't noticed we're on about eight tangents in
this thread.
