I'm blown away by all the griping about the 960 grid layout and how it's so, 2010... Come'on people, if you haven't noticed, browsing is predominantly headed towards mobile and tablet devices.
Guess what, those devices have way more varying resolutions and, not setting a fixed width is totally asking for crappy layouts. Fluid width layouts are 90's tech.
Let's start with all the Android devices with over (current count) 500 display port sizes. That's right. over 500 devices out there with differing resolutions. How can anyone create a fluid design, or the math, to keep up with all that. Mac and PC monitor widths are all over the place! I visit client sites all the time and a lot of them are using modern equipment and running 800x600 still because they like big icons and text.. go figure..
Going to a fixed width layout solves a lot of problems so your not writing 1000's of lines of CSS and JS to cope with all the screen resolutions and issue that come with fluid width layouts.
Whenever a client insists on a fluid width layout, we try to talk them out of it and, if they insist, we pass on the work because, I don't want the support headaches or have a relationship go sour when they start getting calls that the site "doesn't look right" on that persons browser. We have been down this road a couple hundred times and the way to avoid this is a fixed width, with enough CSS and JS to cover FF, WebKit, IE7-8-9 and that's it.
Anything else starts eating into profits and drags out the delivery of the site.
Just MHO....