Hi Joette,
I think Freeway users are used to do it this way, we’ve heard the request for setting an exact page width a few other times. This is reminiscent of when websites had a small “optimized for 1024x768” sticker on them. The web is now overwhelmingly mobile, there’s no going back.
In general what you want is not let the content determine the page width, rather to have make the content work with any page width.
In Sparkle we decided to adopt the fixed page width layout because it is immediately understandable for anyone with a design and print background, and it has a predictable behavior. This isn’t in contrast with the above because you can have multiple fixed width layouts and let the visiting browser automatically pick the layout that fits it best.
So why did we pick 1200/960/768/480/320? Because they are by far the most common browser widths, if you were to chart it out you’d see for example a big fall between 960 and 1000 pixels and another after 1200. This suggests that you should optimize your content for those widths, and not pick some width in between which would be sub-optimal for users on either side.
To partially refine what I wrote above, Sparkle isn’t precisely only fixed width, there are several element types that can extend to the page edges, so you can have a full width image or gallery or map, for example. Also we are working on adding this ability to more elements and blur the lines of fixed/fluid width.
There’s no difference in the purchased version, though as @markg mentions there’s no time limit on the free Sparkle version.
Duncan
http://sparkle.cx http://sparkle.cx/
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