Woohoo! It’s that new layout that I was talking about! Yay! It took less time than I anticipated to finish it. Wordpress is really quite a decent CMS.

New Layout

It’s my first attempt at building my own Wordpress theme instead of modifying the default one. There are still a lot of things that are incomplete (mainly plugin integrations) so I’m calling it “beta” for now. Why “version three” you ask? Well I just felt like it. Please don’t ask me to explain which layouts were version two and one…

Nitty gritties after the break.

Header

The first thing you should notice is the ginormous banner at the top of every page, featuring everyone’s favourite singing software’s 2D avatar, Hatsune Miku. This was a last minute decision during the initial planning stages and the layout itself is not actually inspired by her in any way. In fact, this is what the original draft in Photoshop looked like:

New Layout

But after trying out a few characters, I decided that Miku’s colour scheme is the best match. Purely coincidental. Or maybe it’s one of those subconscious thing. I may eventually add more banners in a random rotation like my old layout, but that’s low priority for now.

Overview

The primary colours used in the theme are #a00, #555, #eee and #ccc. (I love colours that can be shortened to three-digit hexadecimal in CSS.) The RSS feed icon is a 24×24 greyscale PNG taken from Feed Icons’ devkit and overlayed with 100% #a00.

New Layout

One of the most important decisions when designing a website is to choose between a fixed-width layout and a fluid layout. My previous layouts were all fixed to 780px wide so as to accommodate the smallest resolution that people still use, 800×600. It’s quite a commonly-used width because the default Wordpress theme uses it.

The nice thing about fluid layouts is that they work on very tiny resolutions without creating horizontal scrolls. Moetron is an example of a 100% fluid layout. However, lines become very long and ugly when viewed on a larger-than-average resolution, such as 1920×1200 on 24″ widescreen. Paragraphs of text turn into single lines that stretch from one end of the screen to the other.

Most professional blogs are turning to either fixed layouts optimized for 1024 (e.g. Joystiq) or a mixture of fluid and fixed layouts (e.g. Engadget, ANN). The problem with the former is that on smaller resolutions (and windowed browsing), there will be horizontal scrolling involved. The latter is harder to design for and cross-browser implementation makes it a huge pain in the ass.

New Layout
Same page viewed at 800px wide

I chose to go with a semi-compromise. I don’t like my text components changing width, so they are fixed-width. But the navigation bars on the right (or “meta blocks” as I dub them) will drop down to the bottom when viewed in 800×600 so that horizontal scrolling is avoided. I call it a semi-compromise because it all goes haywire if you use some non-standard window size that is between 800 and 1024. There is also some margin issues when moving the meta blocks down.

The design has been tested on the latest versions of Firefox, Opera and IE7. It looks the ugliest on IE7 due to font issues and probably worse on older IE versions due to the use of transparent PNG.

Thumbnails

Every post has at least two thumbnails that are automatically generated. New entries will have three. A 144×144 square thumbnail is for use within the meta blocks, a 180×120 rectangular thumbnail is used in archive mode and a 250×140 resized image is used for the “Previous Entry” section on the main page.

New Layout
Single category view

Thumbnail generation and caching are all handled by Alakhnor’s Post-thumb revisited plugin. Page-loading is slow for the first time when the thumbnails are generated but subsequent loadings use cached image files.

Sprite Navigation

Whoever first thought of making sprite navigation with CSS is a genius. Basically the mouse-over effect that you see on the right uses no Javascript, no image maps and consists of only one single image file:

New Layout
Navigation sprite

Using only CSS background repositioning and a:hover, the concept is just brilliant. Not only does the effect work instantly without having to cache additional images, but it also works without relying on Javascript, which many people block with NoScript these days. I found the tutorial here.

Gravatar

You will also notice that the post comments now support Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatars). If you register an account on gravatar.com and post a comment with the same e-mail address, your associated gravatar will be displayed below. The rest of you get a cool-looking あ faded to grey! Awesome.

New Layout
Gravatar

Final Notes

I don’t think the site is XHTML validated yet because I coded the layout on a local apache server and haven’t had the chance to submit it. A lot of areas are also not extensively tested, such as commenting and error handling. The comment fields in particular were a rushed job. If you notice anything wrong, please post here along with the browser used. Please note that I am not supporting any version of IE older than 7.

So anyway, what do you think?

P.S. I am aware that some posts have issues with the 144×144 thumbnail. I am in the process of fixing it.

Update: The site is note XHTML 1.0 Strict validated. Do inform me if you find any pages that aren’t.

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