Page Layout in Web Page Development

Page layout are of two types:

1.       Fixed width Design: Fixed width design is used to indicate the dimension of the page such as pixels, cm and percentage also. It allows designers much greater control over how their pages appear . Even though a design might look a slidely different size on different resolution monitos, the proportion of element of page can remain same.

For e.g. we can fix or give height, width of our page.

The advantages of fixed width design are as follows:

i)                    Pixels value are accurate for controlling width and positioning of the elements.

ii)                   The designers has far greater control over the appearance and position of items on the page.

iii)                 We can control the length of the line of text.

iv)                 The size of an image will always remain same as relative to the page.

The disadvantages of fixed width design are as follows:

i)                    If a user has font sizes to set a large value, the text may not fit as intended in the allocated space (defined space).

ii)                   If a user browse at higher resolution then the page might look smaller on their screen. Therefore, it would be difficult to read the contents of the page.

2.       Liquid width Design: A liquid width design can stretch to fit the page. We can specify proportion of a page by using percentage value. For e.g. we might decide our page text of 35% of width of the browser so that there is always a small gap around the edges. If the user increases the size of the browser window, the page increases in size but retains the border around the outside.

Advantages of liquid width design:

i)                    The page expands to fill the browser window and therefore doesn’t leave large space around the page where there is a large window.

ii)                   If the user has a small window open in browser, the page can contract to fit that window without the user having to scroll.

Disadvantages of liquid width design:

i)                    If the user have a very wide window, lines of text can become very long and these become hard to read.

ii)                   If the user have a very small window, words may be very small as a result it becomes harder  to read.