New “magazine front” theme

It looks good – however in FF there is a huge empty area under the footer. Just the bg color and scrolling down and down and down but there is nothing ??

It’s intentional. I do it to add some depth to the home page because most (all) the inside pages will be deeper than the home page. That means that all the inside pages will likely have vertical scroll bars while the home page does not — unless it’s artficially elongated. The reason this is a particular bug-a-boo for me. Is I hate the “jitter” one sees when one switches from a page with a vertical scroll bar to a page without. Add the padding at the bottom and jitter is gone.

Did you get a chance to look at the Dining Guide? It’s made up of posts too… another hack at the moment to get the two columns “crammed” into the “narrowcolumn” of the Default design.

I guess it comes down to personal taste ??
For me as a visitor is much more annoying to scroll down and see the nothing than the small “jitter” – of which everybody is aware, and most of us lives with it.

(and if it’s possible I keep myself far away from every Default related issue or question)

This looks interesting! For your reviews, events, etc you might want to check out the Structured Blogging plugin at https://www.structuredblogging.org

I am moving my event calendar/guide/internet radio station (www.exploitboston.com) over to WordPress. If you’re interested in sharing your theme (and links to/from each of our sites, perhaps!), I’m interested in it. ??

Looks good. I especially like the image of the Casino and carousel house in the header.

Joedan, I love your theme! Would you be interested in sharing it with a non-profit I’m setting up a blog for? We’re relaunching https://www.nef-online.org/ shortly, and have a dev install up at https://www.ncs-nj.org/nef/. Your layout is perfect for our non-profit group (it’s our K-8 school’s education association). We’ll be happy to give you full credit as designer of course! -kj-

I’ll definately share… It’s really not a theme so much as it should be a plugin. Although at the moment I’ve hard coded a bunch of php into the page that calls the loop. I should remove the code from there and put it in a plugin so that the concept of primary, secondary and terciary posts can be fitted to any theme.

Before anyone would want to use this approach one would have to understand the limitations. For example… the photos that go with the post can not be larger than the width of the columns for the two secondary level posts. You also have to basically have an editorial policy of keeping the “excerpt” or the text before the <!--more--> tag about the same length in all posts. Otherwise the secondary level posts become unbalanced.

~Joe

Joe, I understand, looks great and I’d love to try it, can you make a .zip available? Or, you can email me using mail at kevin dash jarrett dot net. Thanks!

> Is I hate the “jitter” one sees when one switches from a page with a vertical scroll bar to a page without.

That doesn’t make sense. It is more likely to lead the user to think that other pages too have such content-less black footers and so they will avoid scrolling.

>> That doesn’t make sense. It is more likely to lead
>> the user to think that other pages too have such
>> content-less black footers and so they will avoid
>> scrolling.

The pages in question have very clearly defined footers after which nothing but a solid color is visible no matter how far you scroll down. To think that someone would search for content after a) they found what they’re looking for or b) noticed the obvious end to the page is absurd.

how can i get this theme?it looks great and i’d like to install it, thanks!

Looks great and very professional! Good work!

One thought though, I’d like to see a clickable header image to take you back home rather than the home link in the menu. This is so common that I think many folks have come to expect it.

To think that someone would search for content after a) they found what they’re looking for or b) noticed the obvious end to the page is absurd.

I would be one of those absurd people, and am made very uncomfortable by the extra-long pages.

To your a) : Users will not universally hit your site seeking a single piece of data, and then depart once that goal has been achieved. In that your site is not a yellow pages type reference, but rather a “here’s what’s going on in our community” site, users are very likely to browse about to update themselves on local matters. People will continue to seek content after they’ve “found what they were looking for” because they are very likely interested in finding additional information on the same subject, and, curiously, their scroll bars tell them that there is more information somewhere toward the bottom of every page. Maybe useful links, or the missing navbar or something.

To your b) : While your light grey footers do serve to visually indicate the end of content, keep in mind that they are YOUR footers, unique to your site. Your readers are consumers of many other websites beyond asburypark.com, and will come to your site with certain expectations, based on their experiences with pretty much every other site on the Internet. What is more familiar to them: the design of this new local-issues blog, or the visual cues provided by the scroll bar which appears alongside every other window — browser or otherwise — in their entire computing experience?

Proportional scroll thumbs provide a strong visual cue about how much content a given page contains, and your artificially lengthened pages subtly say that readers MUST scroll down, at the risk of missing content. Then, of course, the content which they were “promised” isn’t there.

The only sites I know of which feature pages that are significantly longer than their content are 1) attempting to hide keywords in black-on-black as an outdated SEO ploy, or 2) badly coded in some way. One of the first things I did when looking at your site was to select-all, to see what was hiding in the empty space at the bottom. While this is likely not what the majority of your readers will think, it wouldn’t surprise me if a significant minority of them did. Not the ideal first impression.

Consider, also, the merits of a page’s scrolling *stopping* when it hits the content bottom. People who use the page-up/down keys are going to overshoot your footer, as will people (like myself) using trackpads with “side-scroll” regions, or folks who scroll using the wheels of their mice, or rely on alternative input methods. If your pages were only as long as their real content, then there would be a nice firm barrier at the bottom of each page, which prevented people from scrolling into the oblivion of your padding.

well it still looks jolly nice I think