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If you’re like me, you like to have a fair amount of control in the way your websites look to the user. As you know, this is not always easy based on the way browers were meant to behave. Browsers were meant to allow differently-sized monitors and windows show the same content, and thus allow for a lot of proportional widths, with the page stretching and scaling to adjust to the different readers. But in these modern days, we can anticipate certain screen resolutions and many pages conform to a rigid width.

Keeping this width is actually quite important from design, usability and branding perspectives, as a matter of fact: my keeping pages a consistent width, we increase the chances that people recognize our pages as something unique (branding), we allow our users to be accustomed to the locations of key navigational components (usability) and we decrease the chances that something unexpected on the page will break the overall design (design).

However, there are very real problems with fixed-width pages that many novices encounter, making fixed width pages a real bear to deal with. I thought I’d take the time to discuss the reasons that – even in a fixed-width page – using proportional sizes has benefits to the designer.

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