Fixed or flexible page width?

I can't help myself and I'll start with the conclusion: please, please, PLEASE don't fix the width of your website! It hurts my eyes every time I encounter such a website. And quite a few of my favourites, places I visit daily, employ this awful layout technique. Why, oh why?

People have been advising against this sort of thing for ages now. It was named one of the Top 10 Web Design Mistakes. And it's always been silly for users with big 21" screens to view a page displayed 600 pixels wide on a 1600x1200 monitor. When you have all that horizontal space, why waste it and display your web site vertically?

Lately, there has been a renewed urgency to stop the fixed width layout madness: while the horizontal space is growing, the vertical space is actually shrinking. Nooo!

Wide screens are increasingly popular

Be it Apple Cinema or your laptop's LCD, the wide format is increasingly the choice of the new display buyer. With the advent of the high definition TV and the dominance of DVD, when using computers to view our media, it only makes sense to purchase screens that can display it in its native aspect ratio.

Many new laptops come with a wide screen

The very notebook I am writing this on, an ultra light weight which I recently purchased, has a wide screen and a resolution of 1280x768. Actually, lots of the notebooks, which are now selling better than desktops, come with a wide screen and a DVD player.

Note: I don't necessarily agree or like this. As a programmer, I prefer tall screens, that can display lots of source code at once. I am even thinking to turn a wide screen on its side, it would be awesome! But I am not - because I too like to be able to watch my DVDs on my computer screen.

Why are you using fixed width?

I've been wondering about and asking this question for years, and I only got two answers:

It looks better this way.
It's easier to read shorter lines of text.

It looks better?! To whom? Certainly not to me, when I have to scroll just to go below the first paragraph of text.

One secret of usability is to make good choices and provide great default. But you should never restrict my ability to overwrite your defaults with my choices that are better suited on my computer.

Allow your visitors to select how to view your website better

If you fix the width, that's it - it can't be changed. No matter what screen the page is viewed on, it will look the same. Even if I have 1600 horizontal pixels, you only allow me to use 600 if you so choose.

It gives you partial control over how the page looks on my computer. But how do you know it looks better, anyway? Maybe it only looks that way to you, who made the design, or on your own computer screen. Have you asked anybody else?

Maybe you made a mistake, so please, allow me to correct it. Guess what - if it doesn't look good or it's hard to read, I'll resize my browser until it does. Trust me.

Your website is not a poster, it is a text container

People do not come to it to see your pretty graphics, your smart designs. They come to get the information, to find out stuff. So let them. Give them what they want. And give them the freedom to look at it as they want.

I am pretty sure you're not into just showing off cute graphics, either. Your goals are more probably satisfied visitors or customers. These are much better served by a flexible page width layout.