Notes on the pending theme change
A few days ago I wrote about my desire to put a new face on this blog. I am in the middle of designing a new wordpress theme just for me and I'd like to tell you a few things about it before I change over.
One of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to WordPress blogs is the amount of whitespace I see. Look below the sidebar and what do you see? Nothing! That waste of space annoys me to no end. My new theme will fix that problem.
The Footer is an often overlooked part of a blog. I intend to put my footer to better use than I do now. I will likely use it to show off things that the dedicated reader is looking for but the casual reader is not. The way I see it the footer can be a good source of real estate for thanking your readers and telling them about popular content on your site. Besides, once you are done reading an article where are you? You are looking at the footer!
Because the majority of my readers use a screen size of 1024x768 or larger I will be moving to a fixed (980 pixels wide) width theme. This will better allow me to use the screen real estate you have and not leave you with tons of whitespace to look at. I'm running even wider than that but I can always bring the sides of my browser in.
I will be bringing in the rounded corners and other Web 2.0 goodness. I'm going to try to do it entirely with CSS but I may have to cheat and use some images. I'm currently trialing some of the rounded corner ideas over on my other blog Cats and their famous owners.
If you have any suggestions or comments feel free to post them below!
- The New Theme
- N00bie on deck
- Connecticut: Say goodbye to 811 for phone troubles!
- New theme sneak peak
- A new blog is born
looking forward to see the new design !!
I’m working on a theme for my site as well, and I was wondering why you decided to go with a fixed width display vs a fluid one? They both seem to have the same amount of whitespace (fluid has it within the “layout” while fixed leaves it on the outside of the “layout”), and I was thinking that it would be more advantageous to have variable widths to accommodate different sized screens. What are your thoughts on that?
Over 50% of my readers use 1024 or wider screens. Only about 8% use something smaller.
If you look at what I have done with catfo you will see that the article text wraps around the sidebar. This takes care of a big problem on Wordpress blogs in regards to wasted space below the sidebar. I hate wasted space!
I do understand that a fixed width theme has wasted space “outside”. The only problem with fluid is that if someone is using a 30″ monitor and runs their browser full screen it will make the site look very messed up. One of the reasons many sites keep their content area 500px wide is to make the content look longer than it actually is. At 30″ my paragraphs look like sentences. Because I know how wide I want each elemment of my site to be I have settled on a certain width for the site and a certain number of columns. some of those columns may be merged but the design principle of X columns will be present.
Anyway you’re giving previews? I can give some kickass feedback.
Perhaps after this weekend I will be giving some previews.
BTW: Does anyone know how Arstechnica does that inside corner on their homepage when the content wraps around the editor block? I noticed that the content is fixed width and only the home page has boxes that the content wraps around.
Well I know that by the time I viewed HMTK today (August 31, 2007) you had a new theme on the homepage. Which by the by, I liked it. It was a bit of a shock not to see the little comic in the upper right corner. But alas, when I came to the story itself it was back. Then just moments ago when I loaded the Tab up in another tab I saw that the old theme was back. Kind of a shame, a bit puzzling and I am sure temporary, since the site will be getting a facelift in the very near future.
So my opinion on the new theme that I saw is that I like it with the exception of the font of HMTK at the top, but that is so minor in my opinion (but perhaps not when it comes to the average reader on the net?). Additionally I would like to see the HMTK Logo, as it were, in the new theme somewhere. Even it is only found on pages in the Archive that were written with that theme.
For the most part you only saw the new header. I was just doing some testing of it and changing out some colors.