Theme Building Challenge
I was recently had the unfortunate experience of using a one of my local libraries computers to access one of my blogs. Not only are they still using IE 5.X they have very limited resolution. Despite 17″ monitors and a couple of 19″ for the really blind folks the resolution was horrible. They were all stuck at a static 800×600 except for the large monitors for the severely visually impaired which were stuck at 640×480. While those setting should be an option, they made for pretty horrific view of many sites I took a look at.
My challenge to theme designers is this design a theme or more importantly themes that make use of the theme switcher plugin. I don’t have all the details worked out yet but there needs to three available sizes of the theme to choose from. The small size should be readable full screen with 800×600 screen size with important data above the fold. The second size should cover the most prominent 1000pixel width size, but not extend past the edges of a 1024 width. The last size should make use of wide screen monitors in either the horizontal or vertical. Figure the resolution of 900×1440 as the widescreen standard.
I don’t know what the prizes are yet either, but if there are any sponsors who want to get in on this let me know. The contest will begin August 1st.
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July 12th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
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July 15th, 2008 at 2:07 am
Well, actually there is no need for various types of themes for different resolution. Just get the designers to create a liquid layout (using proper XHTML and CSS) so that the layout will adjust to whatever resolution users are using.
IE5??? I think that most of the existing website of today will break when viewing with IE5.
July 15th, 2008 at 2:34 am
The problem with liquid layouts is you can only go so small with them and have them still be useful. That threshold is almost always a 1000px width or close there too if you are going to use a sidebar with any sort of meaningful information in it. The biggest problem with liquid formatting is you still have to decide at what width you want it to look its best. A blog with a liquid layout best on a 1024px width monitor will look almost as bad on a 1600px wide as it does on a 640px wide display.
As someone who uses a widescreen monitor having liquid formatting often times makes for bad formatting when it spills across a 22″ monitor having your sidebar ungodly far from the content or worse having entire posts stretch out into two or three lines of text running across the monitor.
Liquid layouts worked really well when the majority of people were using widths between 800px and 1024px. While some of the new monitors still have native resolution at 1024×768 most of them are getting a lot bigger. Theme designers need to start accounting for these bigger sizes with something better than just letting it stretch. Theme switcher will let the end user decide what looks best for them without forcing the blogger to compromise on content vs navigation vs advertising. Less than 200 characters of code will please a lot more people.
BTW You have no idea how bad some sites looked in IE 5. The libraries are up for a levy soon and want to invest in new computers and I am going to be pushing that they drop their silly notion of windows and the even sillier idea of affording Mac’s and go with locally built linux machines with firefox. Twice the machine at half the price.