I like the new “Themes” feature of WordPress 1.5. I can have several layouts available and ready to use at the click of the mouse. The latest layout will get a little more tweaking here and there, but will for the most part look the way it does now. I really loved the three column layouts that I’ve had since I first customized my own layout, but kept running into trouble with columns not showing up right in Internet Exploder (which is one of many reasons you should switch to Firefox if you haven’t already), especially at lower screen resolutions. I run a 21″ monitor at 1600×1200 at home and a 17″ Mac flat panel at 1280×1024 at work, so I’m mostly oblivious to how bad it looked at lower resolutions. Needless to say, if you run at 800×600 you should be ashamed of yourself, and 1024×758 is marginal at best.
I went with a 2 column layout, the first time I’ve been at 2 columns since my early days on Movable Type, to remedy the problems I was having with bad columns. I hope you all like it.
Through all of this, I have learned some things about cascading stylesheets. I am still no professional, but I can wade through a css file much easier now.
Feedback is appreciated. If you see something that looks obviously bad, please leave a comment for me.
UPDATE: Shortly after getting the new layout done, I got an email from Caleb over at Caleb Charles Photo Blog (a fellow MOB’r) offering me a spiffy new title graphic that he whipped up for me. Thanks Caleb!
You are welcome.
Nice, clean layout. Nice graphic up there, too! Personally, I prefer the two-column layouts because it allows more space for the content. I’ve often considered going to 3-columns because my non-content column is so long, but I keep going to back to “Content is King.” Nice job.
Great point that “Content is King”. I often think that I want finding things to be easy, and a long column of various links seems to make it more difficult. It seems to work fine already though, as people are finding my email link, which seems to be lost in the sea of links on the right side.
Three columns still leaves plenty of room for content when people have their screen resolutions set high though, and I think they look better overall. The problem is that the most common resolution is (I think) 1024×768. People either have older monitors that don’t do much better, or they set the resolution low so “they can see the icons”. This leave less room for content, since the cleanest way to do it is to make the content column variable width, which leaves it so narrow it looks horrible at those low resolutions.
Having been recently tested at 20/15 vision, I crank my resolution as high as it will go since I can see everything just fine. It looks nicer to me, but does nothing to attract readers who prefer low resolution.
I love it 🙂
The problem with resolution is that it’s not possible to adjust the resolution on an LCD display. Mine has 1024×768 pixels in it, and there’s not a thing I can do about it… well… I might could go plasma… but I don’t have that much money 😉
Flannel,
There’s exceptions to every rule (or almost every rule). I’d be glad to have a flat screen monitor, even if it only did 1024×768. What gets on my nerves is people like my dad, who has a monitor that will do 1280×1024, but he likes having all his icons big, so he sets it at 800×600. It’s difficult to design a website that will look good at that low of a resolution, and it’s frustrating that he CHOOSES to have it that low.