I will kick off this recurring series with an overview of the basic layout options we have at our disposal. It’s nothing especially earth-shattering, but it’s an important issue to think through properly and just because it seem so basic few do. You might already have heard it a thousand times, that “the web isn’t print”, until your ears fell off. But it’s so true when it comes to layout. In print you can easily sketch up a few layout solution to pick from, based on the page size, proportion and content, and call it a day. The web is something completely different as a medium: the user has complete control over the browser viewport size and font size.
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Over the coming months, I’m going to tear down and redesign this site. I plan to do it slowly, making it a great practice and learning experience for me personally. What I plan to do is chronicle the process, describe steps I’m going to take, what the options are and the rationale behind my choices.
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I have not yet been looking for a navigation link plugin for WordPress. But I imagine I can do one just as quickly myself rather than sift through a zillion plugins that all do the same thing in addition to suffering from bad cases of optionitis.
Right now in addition to the usual rel-stylesheet (for CSS) rel-alternate (for RSS feeds) and rel-pingback (for pingbacks) there are also a rel-start resource link in the header pointing to the home page of the blog.
Here are some additional relational resource links and types to consider.
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For a day or two I have been whining about Sandbox on Andy and Scott’s blogs and in my gettext post. Why? Because I recently “jumped on the Sandbox bandwagon”. Making me boast to friends that I’d switched to a theme that made the site look exactly like as before! While they were staring at me in a way I only could interpret as awe.
The theme really reinvigorated my interest in designing for WordPress since it bring a lot of power to the CSS while giving you harsh constrains on the markup (constrains are good, too many choices result in angst, limitations release creativity). And Sandbox do have the promise of becoming the CSS Zen Garden of WordPress.
So I have decided to collect all my Sandbox “issues” and track theme here in this post.
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