New Style

As you may see from the site, we have taken the plunge and gone for a whole new style here. This has been designed for us by Compuskills and as far as I am aware it will be made available for free download from the compuskills blog site in the very near future.

This theme has also been tweaked a little to try and address some of the issues this blog has been having lately. Hopefully you should now find the site faster and more responsive. If you have any questions or issues with this theme please let us know. We are genuinely interested if you have any problems with the navigation or find the style is broken in anyway.

Thank you for your patience.

[tags]Site Admin, Style, Themes, Compuskills, Blog, Blog Software, WordPress, Downloads[/tags]

12 thoughts on “New Style

  1. It looks very good in linux – using Konqueror to view and it is nice on the eye. Easier to read than the last theme.

    Right hand column seems very wide though, is that on purpose?

  2. Thanks. There are some big issues at the moment. It seems as soon as it works ok in firefox at 1200px by x, it looks unreadable in IE6 etc.

    Good that its ok in Konqueror.

    The tag cloud is a real dog’s breakfast. Better not look at that for a while.

  3. Thanks. The wide blue sidebar is a bit of a kludge to account for people with smaller monitors. At the moment we dont really know what to do about it.

  4. Heather – it looks fine in Firefox and IE 7 here. The tag cloud just suffers from too many tags. It has always looked like that.

  5. 🙂 True. We need to throw most of them out.

    Otherwise- re fat right sidebar. Lets hope it doesnt come down to c***y javascript to determine monitor sizes and deliver different pages. That way madness lies

  6. Also happens in firefox 1.5.0.6, but only if you make the window very narrow. You should probably shoot for something that doesn’t cause issues in a full-screen window at 1024×768, since that is the most commonly used resolution.

  7. Chuck – thanks for the heads up on that problem. We will look into it now and see what needs to be done to sort it out. I had hoped that we’d resolved that issue (using Heather’s IE6/tiny monitor as a testbed).

  8. Hi TW,

    The browser world (IMHO) just isn’t ready for CSS-based placement and floating divisions… there are just too many installed older browsers out there. Although the idea probably doesn’t appeal to you, these issues would likely go away if you just switched to a 2 or 3 column table and allowed the blog content area to expand to fit the size of the window. I know working with tables is pretty fugly, but there’s a reason why they call it the *lowest* common denominator. 😉

    Either way, good luck with your new layout.

    Oh, and if the right sidebar is causing width issues because of the amount of content there, have you considered collapsible sidebars? Sections that pop open only when people click on them? In this way you can just pick the few that people are most commonly going to want to look at (like recent articles, recent comments, photostream, etc) and leave those open, but collapse all the others… if you do that everything fits in one column instead of two, and then you have more area for your content which, let’s face it, is why people show up in the first place. 🙂

    I wrote about collapsible sidebars on my own blog awhile back. Here’s a link if you are interested:
    http://unbecominglevity.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2004/6/30/97796.html

  9. Chuck, some excellent advice there and you are spot on. Fighting these floating divs is like poking my eyes out with a spoon. Far from fun 🙂

    I will check out your collapsible sidebars post.

    In a bit of a sneaky, selfish, way, saving this is going to have to be left to heather now as my broadband connection ends in a few hours and it will probably be two or three weeks before I am back online.

    Heather – sorry 🙂

  10. Chuck, I have to agree. This would all be much easier in a table.

    And apologise to anyone who can’t see the blog properly (including myself) because I cant spend time on it until tomorrow night.

  11. just to confuse the issue a bit more, this works very well on a phone browser! i’ve tried on desktop and there are issues, but on the phone its fine!

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