An account of how a css novice took the splendidly straightforward Kubrick-based default theme, and with a bit of research here and there, managed to turn it into his own version of Kubrick, and how, from there, he then added a third column, and wondered whether too much whitespace could ever be a bad thing.
In short, how I went from:
First stab
to:
Default theme remixed
and on to:
3c-space
Issues
- How much whitespace is too much whitespace? On 1600×1200, which I usually use, there’s quite a gap over to the third column. I don’t mind it - will others?
- How does the blog look at different resolutions? As far as I know, unless you try to squeeze the page really narrow, the divs don’t overlap. 800×600 even looks readable.
- How scalable is this theme? It looks fine on my machines, with my browser settings, but that’s al I know of…
- What exactly is the point of the third column? I have vague ideas for what to put in there other than logging in and out type links, but at the moment, it’s cruelly under-utilised.
Future tweaks
- Add more category images. Not so that the place looks cluttered, but if I can come with nice little icons like the poker chip, I’ll use them
- Think about moving ‘Recent comments’ to the right hand column, and expanding it
- Use right hand column for external info, news RSS output, photo thumbnails, my audioscrobbler info etc
- Increased linkage - for the moment I’ve stuck with the default information set on every post - ie content and metadata, but I’d like to include links off to other topics, or a section for external links after each post. A kind of “Further reading” idea.
Current theme - Random Angles
Not a very descriptive name for the current theme, truth be told, since all the angles are very carefully arranged, and all the boxes align sweetly (in IE and Firefox).
As of now, I still have plenty of ideas for improvement, and plenty of leaks to plug: