VeronicaRose

Edit: my post was not really necessary, was it?
– deleted

P.S. I’m not using my most recent posts right now, so if anyone comes to my site expecting to see what this looks like you might be disappointed. Just thought I should let you know. But it does work.

I’d personally love the following:

Home
Most Recent Posts
Category Lists/Archives (depending on choice)
About
Contact
Meta (RSS Feed,etc…)

This is what I have in my sidebar to make the last five posts appear:

<?php get_archives(‘postbypost’, 5, ‘html’, ”, ”, false) ?>

<?php
$categoryvariable=$cat; // assign the variable as current category
$query= ‘cat=’ . $categoryvariable. ‘&orderby=date&order=ASC’; // concatenate the query
query_posts($query); // run the query
?>

When I look at this I don’t understand which part I’m supposed to replace with the title of the category that I want changed. Can someone please help me?

Hm, the option to have it or not would be good.
Options are always good.

Wow. Thanks to both of you. I’m just going to decide which option to use now.

Since you already have five columns I’d try to reduce the clutter in other ways – like nixing the background image.

I found it disturbing.

I think you’ve already done a very good job. The colors are understated and suitable to your topic, the text is completely legible (finally someone understands). The images are well placed and go with what you are trying to say. The advertising does not overpower the site. Nor did I have any problems navigating it.

If I understand the purpose, then it is to showcase some great art and literature – and make fun of the not so great stuff.

I think that the writing style is the best part, though. I have an MA in art and I’m sick of this faffy-pretentious tone that everybody’s writing in and their idea that the art world revolves around the museum. Get real. This site has a more down to earth feel and I really like it.

I’d read it.

The only thing I can really say is that I think it would be better if the quotation marks were just to the side of the text instead of laying underneath it. It would make it more legible. Or you could darken that font. But personally, I don’t think that the contrast is high enough right now for you to overlap those things.

Thanks Moshu. I was hoping that somebody would step in here and look at it because I don’t have other browsers besides the much despised internet explorer. Why on earth would it have a horizontal scroll on a browser that large?

Anyway the lines of text are too long. It should probably be a smaller percentage of the page. But then it shrinks up real nasty in smaller browsers. Makes me think that fixed width wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

mycoo62: have you thought aboout changing your template? Some of them are more flexible than others. The one I’m using shrinks up great, which is the actually the only reason I chose it. But then again it lacks a header – a price I was willing to pay for not watching my columns shrink or staring at negative space. Plus I thought the nontraditional format was quirky in a good way.

I’d suggest taking another look at the available themes and testing them in different browsers at different resolutions before choosing.

Nevermind.
Go to https://www.veronicarose.com/index2.html

Play with the browser to see how it degrades at different resolutions. Now imagine that the whole background is black with gray font. See if that’s more or less what you want.

With relative width you will lose some control over the look of your page as it morphs to fit different screens. That’s why I think so many people prefer fixed widths. You can really control the layout if you fix it, but it means people with smaller resolutions scrolling or people with larger resolutions staring at a lot of negative space. That’s what’s happening with your site right now. I checked the site you have now in a few resolutions and it looks best in 800px, which is standard so that’s good. But at the upper end there’s too much negative space and at 600px you have to scroll to the right to see the sidebar.

With the fluid content though, it also looks best at 800px. So ultimately, there’s no perfect solution. You will have to make a decision.

I couldn’t get the min-width thing to work so I looked up some css tutorials and discovered that internet explorer does not support it. I’d have to apply a hack and it’s late at night so I’d rather not try to figure that out right now.

I think it looks okay on 800 px monitors, which are the norm and on 1024, which are more and more common. But it looks like crap on 600 px monitors. It’s going to need a hack to stop the text from shrinking if you want to use it. Probably a minimum size of 450px. The good thing is that hardly anybody browses on a 600px monitor anymore.

Well, it’s up to you now to leave it the way it is, or try to change it.

I was writing a little tutorial for you and I just realised something: your sidebar is on the right and I made mine on the left so if you want me to tell you how to do it your way it might take me some more time to experiment. If you want to do it my way I can tell you how I did it. Just depends if you’re attached to the sidebar on the right or if it was a fluke that you put it there. If you like it that way then give me some time to experiment and see what I can come up with.

1) Yeah I was suspicious about suggesting that you remove the border because I’ve had that experience many times when I think that something would look better if I changed it, do so, and then gasp in horror. I was thinking about the empty space so I’m not surprised you said that.

One solution, that I don’t know if you’ve already thought of, would be to change your css so that the site takes up a relative percentage of the screen instead of a fixed amount. You only have two columns so it shouldn’t be too hard to do. You have a header, a body, and a footer. You could let these things take up about eighty percent of the screen maybe, or more or less – whatever. Then, within your body you can make the the sidebar a fixed width, and the content fluid. That way you don’t mess up your navigation and the content’s width will expand or shrink to fit the leftover room. You can also set a minimum width beyond which the content will not shrink, if you’re so inclined.

That way your site will look good on any size computer screen and you don’t have to worry about the negative space. Maybe you already thought of that and rejected it for some reason, but if you just don’t know how then I can try to help you.

2) Speaking of font, I don’t know if you’ve seen my site when I kept asking people for help but if you look in the comments section under the post “This site is under construction” there is a little debate about font between me and someone from here who went to take a look. Basically we were talking about the difference between a site that looks professional and a site that looks personal and I was going for personal.

You can read the long boring explanations about reader studies and personal preferences there but the gist of the conclusion we reached is that Verdana is consistently ranked as easier to read by viewers and is widely available on most computers. Since you’re having problems with the white (gray) on black background you might want to stick to an easy to read font like Verdana. Definetely sans-serif, though whatever you decide. Serif fonts are not recommended for the web because they are harder to read on screen (easier in print).

For my own site I chose Trebuchet MS and Comic Sans Ms. Trebuchet Ms is similar to the popular Arial, but said to convey more personality by those who purport to know these things. It’s a bit sassy. Comic Sans Ms is another font with loads of personality and is a real attention getter that was developed to be used for comics and I think it conveys a humorous tone very well. I did think it added more visual appeal and created a more friendly tone to my site after changing the font. But I had to increase the size slightly to compensate for not having chosen a very neutral font.

So basically I’d think about what you can do with Verdana, Comic Sans MS, or Trebuchet MS. If you don’t like any of those, the long discussion about various fonts and their merits or demerits can be found in those comments on my website.

Just came back to see what other people had to say and I take a look at it again since you said you changed the font.

If it were me personally I might remove the border and change the font so that it looks more relaxed, but it’s not me and what you have looks okay. And I do agree that I don’t like the colors. You could desaturate them a bit so that they’re not so garish. But if you really like them then at least they are easy to see.

Your site does look very ‘slick’ so if you want a more personal feel that might not be an advantage and I could think of several things you might want to change. But you didn’t say that you were going for the ‘out of my basement’ look, so I guess it doesn’t matter. On the upside what you have is uncluttered, well organized, easy to navigate, the colors match, and the visibility is good. Your logo is eyecatching, proffesional looking and you used your domain name – which means that people can remember how to find you again easily.

If you think it’s a good reflection of your personality than don’t worry about whether the site looks too pop or anarchist. Personally I did not think of either thing at all when I looked at your site. I was wondering if the pink in my own design isn’t too soft and girly for the image I’m trying to convey but 1) it worked with what I was wearing in the photo I have up, and 2) it’s easier on the eyes than red, plus 3) it fights stereotypes if people are expecting me to be nice because I have a pink website.