Photo site design: fixed size or flexible?

When designing a site consisting mostly of images, should the site be
fixed size or flexible? From my understanding, a flexible design allows
text to wrap and position according to the browser window size and
resolution. This works well with pages with lots of text and small
images. But if a web page's main content is a large image, does flexible
design make any sense?

There is a large image and a few thumbnails on each of the following two
pages. I think the first one is fixed size, and the second one is
flexible. Which do you consider a better design in terms of fixed size
or flexible?

http://service.foliolink.com/Image.asp?ImageID=24717&apid=1&gpid=1&ipid=1&AKey=8V5M8Y3L

http://www.tommywrenn.com/people/index.htm

 

I think the crucial question is the text rather than the images. Lines of
text longer than 500 pixels are very hard to read and people tend to skip
them, so you want to design a site so that this can't occur very easily (can
be done with both fixed and flexible sites, but you need to consider a lot
of different browser sizes). For a mostly photo site (without a lot of
descriptive text), either fixed or flexible should work.

I see problems with both the examples - the first one doesn't fit on the
screen when the browser is sized at 800 by 600 (which a lot of people still
have). The second one makes you scroll to see the pictures (at least at
lower screen resolutions) - which means you don't really see the pictures.

Flo

 

How do you design a fixed size site so that it will not display long
lines of text?

I tend to agree with your comments about the two sites. I think the
scrolling on the second site is a result of using frames, which I don't
like. The first site not fitting into a 800x600 browser window is more
difficult to deal with. But at least there is only one frame to scroll.
With most monitors at 17" and bigger, not sure if designing for a
800x600 window is still valid.

Can you suggest a few photo sites that are well designed? I kind of like
how these two sites keep the thumbnails and a single enlarged image on
the same page.

 

If you fit the whole page into a table with one cell, you can give this
table a fixed width.

 

Sure it does. Give the user a choice of image sizes.

 

You make the cell (if using tables) or the div (if using css) that contains
the content text no larger than 500 px.

I think the size you shoot for depends on your audience. I walk into offices
all the time with 17 inch monitors set at 800 x 600. The last figures I saw
were something like 40% (or perhaps more) still at that resolution. If you
have a general audience, they're not going to be happy scrolling sideways.
But, for example, I'm designing a site for a photographer right now and his
main audience is art directors at major magazines. We're sizing it for 1152
x 864.

There are a lot of good sites out there. I agree with you about the
thumbnails and the single large image. You're welcome to take a look at the
first comp for the site I'm designing -
http://www.anamidesigns.com/mark/color1.html. The portfolio menu item will
have a dropdown with the names of his various gallerys. The thumbnails are
all the same now as this is just to get an idea of what we want to do, but
of course they'll all be different photos in the final version - and we've
decided to make them larger.

As I said, this is for a large monitor resolution, but you could do
something similar and just size it down for your audience.

I think either of the 2 example sites could be tweaked to work with just
minor adjustments.

Flo

 

I don't claim www.ellisisle.com is a well-designed site, but
initially it was flexible. A viewer could drag the browser
window to any size and the image would re-size with it.

There was lots of criticism about loss of image quality at
various sizes and I was urged to change it to the fixed size
it is today.

--David