Best V10 Theme & Fluid Width themes?

[Nicholas1]

I have just upgraded to V10, and always liked the look of the Smart layout, especially because of its fluid/liquid width design which expanded to fill the browser width. However, I read somewhere that the Smart layout uses tables and is not Search engine friendly.

I am assuming that the V10 new Themes (Bobcat and Silver) fix this issue, so I wanted to know if anyone thought one of these was better than the other regarding SEO, or if it makes no difference? ( i am not skilled enough to take a pure CSS theme and make it look nice!)

Also, I really liked Smart because it was Fluid/liquid regarding width, but I see that the new themes (Bobcat and Silver) do not allow this? (Virtually all of the commercially available templates also used fixed widths too.)

1.) IS there a very easy way to make them expand?
2.) Is there a particular reason there would appear to be a trend towards fixed width websites in general?
3.) Would I be better of ditching my desire for a fluid and going fixed?

[Duncan Rounding]

Fixed width designs are usually easier to design, work better across browsers and thus make product layouts more predictable.

The new Silver theme is a popular css theme 2 column. The Bobcat theme is three column and also primarily css. I don't which would be best for SEO but I would expect both to be better than the Smart theme.

[Nicholas1]

Is there a particular piece of CSS in Silver/Bobcat theme which you can set to 100% to make the themes expand to full browser width, or, would it be more complex than, i.e. would all the other CSS things (guessing here...) like products and product section layouts need changing too in CSS?

[pinbrook]

1.) IS there a very easy way to make them expand?
2.) Is there a particular reason there would appear to be a trend towards fixed width websites in general?
3.) Would I be better of ditching my desire for a fluid and going fixed?

As monitors with larger resolutions are becoming more and more widespread, I feel it is better to go fixed width. Fluid design is quite hard to control, you often end up with product descriptions filling the width of a screen - all on one line.

This makes it more difficult to read - there is a reason why newspapers for example use columns as it facilitates speed reading.

I often find myself resizing my email client so i can read the text across narrower lines.

CSS is better for SEO than tables.
Fixed is better on the eyes

[Nicholas1]

ok folks, thanks for the informative information, It sounds like fixed width is the place to be.