A Quick Note about Site Width and the iPhone

Making the decision to go with a fixed width or fluid width for your website can be agonizing. The geek in you welcomes the challenge of designing a site that fills any browser, while the marketer in you wants the absolute control over the layout afforded by fixed width design. In the end, fixed width often wins out.

Now that millions of iPhones are circulating in the wild, you need to take a look at how your site is rendering in this pocket-sized format. Ideally you should be developing a special version of your site optimized for the iPhone, but in reality you will probably only have time to tweak a few things.

One thing to look at is how many pixels you've chosen for your fixed width site. I've noticed that fixed width sites designed to support a 1024 pixel width look better than those set to support an 800 pixel width. The content fills the screen and the text is more legible (see screenies below). This might be an easy CSS change for your site, which will make it instantly more readable on the iPhone. So, if you've needed one more reason to help convince a stakeholder that a move to a wider site is needed, this just might help.