Thursday, August 9, 2012

Blog Layout Changes?

I wish it dawned on me that not all monitors can view this blog like mine can. I was on two different computers this afternoon and each one had to scroll left and right to view the entirety of a blog post.  Therefore, I will be slightly altering the layout of Material Middle-Earth to make viewing easier.

I'm thinking of doing the following:
  • Smaller pictures, but keeping to 3-4 seperated images per post in a vertical fashion
  • Going back and either breaking down the pics in previous posts to accomodate the previous idea OR just shrinking the display size on the blog. I believe you can click the smaller photos to see the original size one in a powerpoint-like style. (EDIT: And yes, this does work...yay!)
  • Arranging the gadgets to be on boths sides of the posts that way one side of the screen isn't overwhelmed with everything. Trying to make this more navigation friendly.
  • New color scheme and possibly a new banner for the blog. The pictures here seem to be brighter than expected, so a brighter theme may be in order.
For those of you who view this, feel free to chime in with suggestions or comments : ) I'll start working on this sometime next week!

Thank you for the feedback so far!

4 comments:

  1. Your pictures display fine for me. :) I've found my own layout to be a little frustrating as it limits me to 500 px wide. I wish I had a little more leeway but I haven't found time to fiddle with it.

    I like that on my blog, the categories is a drop-down and the tags are in a cloud. This saves some vertical space and makes it look less cluttered, so maybe you could find something like that? I don't think making another column is the way to go; I think that could get confusing. Most people seem to use two columns.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It sounds like Wordpress wouldn't be ideal for my style because of that size limitation. I was actually thinking of shrinking the blog panel itself out of consideration of smaller monitors. I went and played around with the possibilty of a column on the other side of the page and it didn't work out so well...too much being thrown at you at once. I'll be sticking with two then!

      Delete
  2. I like your present layout too. Your pictures are big and beautiful. :) But I understand that you want your blog to be comfortable to read for viewers with a range of monitor sizes. Hopefully if you resize your screenshots you won't run into a loss of resolution -- I had this issue once on my blog while I was sorting out my layout and it was a headache! Just something to take into condsideration I guess.

    Anyway, looking forward to seeing your new layout when it's ready! :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Didn't expect to see a new post as soon as I replied to ponyloversanonymous :) I did some experimenting with the photos on a previous post by shrinking down the display size. It turns out with blogspot that when you click on the smaller pic, you're brought to a powerpoint presentation of the original size photos. It might be even more reason to do what I mentioned above and shrink the size of the blog window itself. I'd just have to go back to the old posts and downsize those, then come back and shrink the blog panel a tad. I'm thinking of shaving off something between 100 and 200 pixels.

      It's great to be a part of a friendly and helpful community! :)

      Delete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

Contact Form for Material Middle-earth

Name

Email *

Message *