When choosing blog tools to use, one of the main factors I end up taking into account is what they look like. It’s silly really because what a blog looks like is up to me really. Except that it’s not. Having used and liked both Drupal (lots of community-oriented features) and Wordpress (easy to hack) I started to like Wordpress for the extremely shallow reason that it looks nicer.

A worring aspect of why a Wordpress blog generally looks nicer is that, in general, Wordpress templates tend to be fixed width. Now, normally I think I prefer liquid layouts because they put the user in charge. And usually a liquid layout means the bigger the window, the more data you get. Liquid seems better for all sorts of usability reasons.

But fixed width, somehow, seems to look nicer. Is it that fixed means that you end up with control over idea line lengths, a huge usability issue with regards to readability? Is it that fixed-width designs, by being easier to build and control get more “design time” spent on them?

I used to be so pro-liquid now I’m not so sure.