Out With The Old Blog Layout & In With The New

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Last weeks WordPress upgrade nightmare, noted here, has finally come to an end. I spent the last few days searching for the right theme to tweak and make my own. This was not an easy task and proved to me more time consuming than the half day spent customizing the theme. The blog as you see it is the end result. For those lacking a photographic memory below is the comparison between the two. So what is different? See below…

New vs Old JMG-Galleries Blog Layout
Click to enlarge

Although the differences may not be obvious to most due to the similar font and image treatment the old and new layouts are quite different. The two biggest differences is the layout is now wider and supports 3 columns versus 2 columns. I had been meaning to make this upgrade for sometime and last weeks incident gave me the urgency to pursue it. In addition to the two column on the right I wanted to implement a theme with an information filled footer. My hope is that this new layout will help me better display information pertaining to the blog, my podcast and of course my photography all while providing viewers faster load time.

Am I happy with how things are? Well things are better than they were, but I’m still not 100% satisfied with the layout. I’ll be making some minor tweaks in the future, so for those with a keen eye keep your eyes open.

A question for those who have subscribed to this blog for sometime… is the load time performance better? I’ve received some preliminary feedback that the blog does indeed load faster, but I’m curious to get a broader sampling of feedback. Thanks in advance!

Technorati Tags: WordPress, upgrade, layout, JMG-Galleries

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Posted by Jim on 05.05.2008 at 12:33 am
Tagged: Updates & Announcements

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Jim

@Susheel thanks for the tip on Slimbox I'll check it out.

Susheel Chandradhas

Jim,

Its looking good... I've used lightbox on some sites that I've worked on, never thought of using it on the blog. I'll most likely add it now though...

Personally I prefer to use "slimbox" which, as I recall is a tad lighter on the size of the code and is also standards compliant. You may want to check it out.

Jim

First thanks to everyone for your feedback.
Second I've taken everyones feedback into account and fixed the background alignment issue, font line height squeeze and even added the lightbox plugin (to experiment with for now). If you're still seeing layout problems or performance degradation do let me know.

Susheel Chandradhas

Gary,

Interesting to see how you evaluate a blog. I've not really paid much attention to the titles, I'll have to take a look at them now...

Jim,

May I offer another suggestion? I feel that increasing the line-height in your text may help readability. Right now it feels like I'm reading a bit too much prose... For the record, I'm viewing your site in FF 2 on Leopard.

Jim Goldstein

@Susheel Thanks for the feedback. Intersting take on the background image in the last theme. Who would a thunk it :)

@Gary I'm still not settled on the arrangement of content in the footer and on the side navigation. Your feedback is helpful in that it emphasizes my need to think more about user behavior and the positioning of the content.

Gary Crabbe / Enlightened Imag

Good job,Jim. Looks great. Although personally I'd like to see your recent posts near the top. When I look at a blog for the first time, how his blog posts are titled are one of the first clues I look toward to determine if there will be more content I want to explore.

Cheers.

Susheel Chandradhas

Jim,

The new layout looks much cleaner; Specifically the background. The old layout's striped background used to create a great deal of visual interference when scrolling; more so when I used an LCD monitor.

There seems to be a glitch somewhere... when I clicked on the "10 comments" link at the bottom of this article (from your main page) I got taken to a different post entirely! You may want to look in to that... Overall, I think its nicer than the old theme. A bit more tweaking will make it look pretty neat!

PS: noticed that bloopy is having the same trouble as me...

Jim

Well I've since figured out that the alignment issue is a problem in every browser but Firefox. At the moment I'm not sure what is up with the comment number error. I'll be fine tuning the blog in the coming days. Thanks to everyone who have provided feedback.

@archshrk you can set a css style to span the width of the column space. Funny the meta was at the bottom of the page and I opted to move it out. I may change my mind later and reverse it. For now this will do. Email me for more info if you're curious.

@Jeff I am planning on adding a Lightbox feature at some point. I just didn't have enough time this weekend to add that on.

@Dan and @ Richard thanks for taking the time to comment. I appreciate the feedback.

Dan Mitchell

Jim:

Looks great to me and loads significantly faster on my Macs running OS X 10.5.x and Safari.

Dan

Jeff Revell

No problems loading on Firefox on my Mac. The one thing I like which I have on my blog also is the date stamp at the beginning of each post. It took me a while to find a theme I liked that had that feature. My only question is, have you considered adding a Lightbox feature for your images? It really does add something to the blog page by not having to always load the images in a new blank page.

Jeff

archshrk

As it looks now, I like it. I could see some tweaking to get things "just right" but all that would be a personal preference issue. I'm curious how you got the sidebar to be both 1 and 2 column formats. I've considered doing that myself, is your theme available for reverse engineering?

My only suggestion is try to keep the sidebars close to even. Maybe show only the parent categories by default. And move the META to the bottom of the page.

Mark Zanzig

Jim, the layout looks good, but it seems to not display properly on my 1024x768 laptop screen with IE7. It seems like the article column in the left is pushed too far to the left, i.e. the first couple of letters are missing in each line. I suggest to make the grey bar on the left side about 10-12 pixels less wide; that should fix it.
Also see the same as bloopy, "10 comments" when I am in fact # 7.

Richard Wong

I like how this version looks better, cant comment on the loading since I never had a problem w/ the old one. your home page though is a bit sluggish though last time I checked.

Jim

@Szymon and @D.T. North Thanks for the feedback. I'm seeing this now in Safari as well. Looks like I'll have to make some adjustments.

D. T. North

Don't know that it loads faster, but it's definitely cleaner.

I can confirm Szymon's comment - it is messed up in IE 6.0 (that archaic POS browser...I loathe that thing as a web designer). The specifics are the left margin...that gray band extends out into the page much further than it should.

Szymon

The new layout still messed up in IE 6.0. :(

Jim

@bloopy thanks for the heads up on this bug Brian. I'll have to take a look into this. Good to hear the load time is improved for you.

bloopy

it loads much faster now. . . one thing i should point out is that on the page in which i enter comments, there's a bit that says how many comments there are (it's just underneath the "share this" line that has the little green icon), only it's referring to different post as it says "10 comments on this item" but i appear to be the first. . . also, when i click on the link it takes me to one of your blog posts from january. . .