Saturday, April 23, 2011

Improving Blogger Templates

"Content without the ability to communicate will simply stay isolated. So presentation is essential and it must be refined."

Define how you want to present it:
  1. Can aesthetics truly be fluid? For the template of my blog, I want to design for certain ranges that appeal to me on an average mini notebook, an average laptop and an average desktop screen. I say that but I'm really aiming for the area that a browser's content window has available to it at any given time, While keeping in mind that there is the resolution to factor in because it can show more for less, so one has to take into account what an average user's eyes are comfortable with. Therefore, simply counting on the browser's dom/javascript variables that let me know the height & width in em (pixel measurements) should do very nicely.
  2. I also want to experiment by empowering the user to have controls/buttons that can instantly change the browser size to one that offers the ideal sizes for more or less content to digest for the given website. I don't want to aim for the browser's resize event off the bat and even if I did, I would only make a change if the resize event crossed boundaries between two very wide ranges that I've set based on my "presenter" aesthetics.
  3. Just as much as the reader for any content has preferences or tastes (consciously or subconsciously) for what presentation layout works best for them. The writer too plans on how to draw in the readers from the first glimpse, to the first pass, all the way to repeated use.
  4. What's most important in this blog right here? 1st the content that brings users here and finding exactly what they were looking for, 2nd the widgets that let them have better access to the content. So what I want to do is define the ranges (first & foremost) based on the segregation of the content and the widgets.
  5. What is the minimum width that my content must have to please me? I would say that I'm highly biased towards picking the width that the bloggers's edit window imposes upon me! Even with the preview option available to me, I tend to write within that constraint of 675 pixels and I'm always leaning towards cutting my content short to match that width in as beautiful and succinct a manner as I can.

Perhaps a poll is in order to get some real data on preferences.

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