One of the things we really wanted to do at Wallwisher was to build our own blog theme using the UI principles we swear by. Some of the things we wanted in our blog theme were:
- A floating layout. A fixed width layout does not reward people with large screens. A blog is primarily text and therefore a floating layout can be easily accomplished.
- 2 column with a collapsable sidebar. More than 2 columns compete with the user’s attention. The sidebar should be collapsable to allow the user to focus on a lengthy article. It also allows users of smaller screens to read effectively.
- Limited use of images for better performance. The world is perfect when you browse the Internet from your broadband connections in the US. But things can get really ugly and frustrating even the seemingly most uber urban places like Singapore. You want to tear your hair off sometimes when you have to wait 5 seconds for the blog to show up, just because it takes time to download those rounded rectangles/gradients.
- Effectively separate primary and secondary information. Primary information being the post text, and the secondary information being the categories, tags, permalinks, etc etc. A lot of blogs we see have, what we call, a dumpster footer – full of meta data about the post that is not used by 90% (a ballpark figure) of the readers.
- Use of colors to differentiate page elements. The web is such a visual medium, it hurts to see elements on a page separated like on a traditional journal – underlines, a difference in font sizes, etc etc. The easiest and the most effective way to achieve the differential is to use colors to separate the elements.
Look, for example, at the google blog design below. I understand they want to be simple n all, but com’on! Everything here is white and grey. The blog uses only 50% of my 1440px screen. For us here at Wallwisher, at least, it is not an easy read.
But well, the earth refuses to rotate slower than we want it to sometimes and the days are still 24 hours! So unfortunately, we did not have the bandwidth to make our own wordpress theme.
However, sifting through the wordpress themes on the Internet, our eyes stopped on this wonderful theme called Ahimsa, which, if we’re not wrong, means Peace. The theme, in our opinion, is almost perfect. Just look at it:
- Floating layout
- 2 COLUMN COLLAPSABLE SIDEBAR
- It hardly uses any images. The rounded rectangles you see (or you don’t see) are purely CSS, which means IE users would not see rounded edges, but FF users will. This, we believe is the best way to go about such issues. We’ll make a post on this soon.
- Look how things like categories and tags are hidden until you click on the word. Brilliant, just brilliant. We checked the size of JS required to support it – just 2kb, or 300ms on a 56kbps connection.
- Look how well things are separated by color. Ok, we agree there is a bit too much color (we’ll work on it when we have a bit of time) but the idea is right.
This theme is just fantastic. We hope that more people would follow these rules when they design their own themes. weagree sometimes you need the gloss, but for simple text journaling, Ahimsa is one of the best themes we’ve ever come across. Kudos to Ravi Sarma for creating such a wonderful theme!
