You have likely heard terms fixed, liquid, or responsive from the tech guys or designers. You wonder what these terms are and if your business can utilize any of them. Let’s explore the terms separately to discover if any one of them applies to your business.
Fixed Design
Web pages with fixed design have widths that won’t change when viewed on different browser sizes. Users find it annoying if they can’t access your site contents on smartphones, tablets, or other smaller devices. They won’t be able to scroll up or down, and zooming texts on the page using ”pinch and expand” becomes disturbing.
You can only have the full website experience on a desktop computer’s browser that was used to design the site. The texts and images fall apart when the browser size is reduced or enlarged.
Fluid (or Liquid) Design
When a browser resizes, the texts and images on that particular page spread to oc
cupy its width as it expands. Thus, the content looks decreased or enlarged – a term called liquid design.
Unlike using fixed columns in fixed design, the webpages content columns are built with percentages. Therefore, the size of the columns decreases or increases relative to each other.
Responsive Design
Responsive web design is a modern design strategy that makes website pages automatically display on different screen sizes. The pages adapt and display on all device screen sizes such as smartphones, desktops, tablets, or laptops.
With a responsive web design, users don’t have to resize, scroll or pan the webpages to reads their content. Also, a responsive website is not designed in multiple formats to fit into different devices. Rather, in a single format that allows the browsers to change automatically in different devices’ screen sizes.