Spanking Blog: A Bit Of Redesign
Hey, everybody. My apologies for the limited spanking updates recently — I’ve had my head “under the hood” mucking about with the WordPress templates, which are ancient and creaky and full of horrible code and bad CSS.
The thing that impelled me to tackle this round of redesign is my own aging eyes. The previous version of this design was intended to work (without any scrolling) down to screen sizes of 800×600. There aren’t too many people still using screens that small (except on mobile devices — my next project) which means that there’s no longer any reason to use the tiny little 320-pixel photo sizes I adopted back in 2003, and no need to subject my poor eyes to the tiny fine print that the old sidebar used. By assuming screen sizes of 1024×768 and up, I was able to make a wider sidebar, scale up the font sizes of the sidebar links, and still have enough room left over to nearly double the size of the pictures in the main blog post. I hope the rest of you find the result as much easier to see and to read as I do.
It’s highly probably that I’ve completely broken something somewhere, so if you see any borked stuff, please leave a comment (or email me!) telling me what looks borked to you. Please don’t forget to tell me what operating system and browser you are using if you do this!
Thanks for your patience.
Thanks for all the work. I am running Safari and everything seems to work fine.
Just a slight observation…. because the pictures are bigger now I think the main section feels very left heavy if that makes sense. It is OK with the text as it fills the main body. Just from a purely visual point of view I am wondering how the pictures would look if you centred them with in the posts rather than a left justify.
Mollyxxx
Opps… I am windows 7, Firefox 9.0.1
Mollyxxx
Yes Molly, I think that’s a good idea, so I’m trying it out. Let me know what you think!
FWIW, I don’t think it worked so well to have the old narrow pictures centered; the left alignment was the only way to not sort of visually “lose” them when mixed with text. But the newer ones are wide enough, I think, even for fairly wide screens. I’m not 100% convinced yet — I might change my mind and go back to left alignment — but so far, I’m preferring the change.
Looks good to me so far :-) Nice work! I’m on Firefox.
Keep in mind for mobile, don’t redesign, re-think. Content is king. If you block content like newspapers do (sort of templates design not the newspapers are dying thing), you’ll be able to reuse your content more freely. That will optimize it for smartphones. Creating a paid ap for android wouldn’t be a bad idea.
Fancy Pants, I appreciate the suggestions. Better accommodating smart phones is my next design challenge, and it’s a technical stretch for me. But it must be done.