What is Liquid Design?
The term "liquid" implies that a Website should flow smoothly into whatever space it is given. If you use a high resolution monitor, this may mean that you need to resize your browser a little, which most people in that situation do. If you have a low resolution moitor, you will still see the information, it will just be a little more compact.
If you do Liquid Design right, you should be able to make your pages display on almost anything and still make sense to the user. But it's not just about making a page 'flow' with the browser window. The principle of Liquid Design goes hand in hand with the principles of accessibility.
Not everyone has perfect vision, and many of your potential customers may indeed be blind. If you build your site using relative font units and percentage based widths for common elements, you'll already be making life a lot easier for a portion of your visitors, if not many of them.
How to implement liquid design principles on your website
Step 1: Change your mindset
Well, the first thing you'll need to do is to change the way you think about the Web. The whole Liquid Design concept is a mindset...
- Throw away the need to have your pages look exactly the same on every device
- Be prepared to compromise your ideals
- Start thinking about accessibility issues as you design
- Hold your head high, you're making the 'net a better place!
Step 2: choose a markup language
There are two major ways to tackle Liquid Design:
1. With Tables
2. With CSS-P
I'm a great advocate of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and for accessibility and Liquid Design (not to mention speed, good markup and SEO issues) it's a clear winner. Clean, uncluttered markup will not only make your pages load faster, but you'll also find the whole process of writing liquid layouts much more intuitive....and before anyone starts shouting about NN4, yeah, I know: if your audience comprises a high proportion of NN4 users, you may well be best off with a tables-based approach.
