Jell-O: Just Add Water :

Something of a rarity, there really isn't a whole lot of Jell-O out there for the feasting . Only a few sites make use of this kind of style in web design. It's not much different than Ice design, however. Just add some center tags, that's it when you get down to the nitty-gritty. Davis describes it as, "...a bit more flexible. It is a design that, if the browser window is resized, it will center itself to fit the display."3 A few good examples of these types of sites are The Web Standards Project, DigitalThread, and HeadSpace. There are certainly more out there, but these will satisfy the point.

Liquid: Just Add Water :

Liquid is perhaps one of the most difficult styles of design one can possibly develop. "Liquid is the epitome of good web design and the fluid that should be used to hold web pages together. A liquid page will resize to fit whatever size browser window (within reason) that the user has available,"4 Davis mentions. That kind of design typically involves a lot of forethought in designing a webpage. The developer must consider not only typical web issues such as complex layout, text wrapping and all the browser inconsistencies , but also any screen's width and height. A few good examples of sites that have tackled the liquid design concept successfully are Builder.com, Falkon Design and ProjectCool. Jeffery Zeldman also mentions how he used some of the ideas of liquid design when he built A-List-Apart in the article "No Blue: Design Notes on Alistapart.com."

The Four Inch Rule :

Zeldman writes, "We've debated the issue for four years, but the truth is, nine times out of ten, the 'best' web layout is the one which fully embraces the medium, by allowing itself to reflow as it is poured into different readers' individual computing setups."5 There is an unspoken rule in print which states that text should not exceed four inches in width on a page. Any text less than four inches is more readable than any text over four inches--the reader's whiplash will speak for itself. In following this rule we can incorporate the same concept into web design with a fixed-width table inside of a 100% width table, as is the case with Digtal-Web.com. Dointhis not only allows for better readability at higher resolutions, but it also allows the designer to incorporate the proper blank space needed to make the page appear more aesthetically pleasing to the eye.