One Blog Layout Aspect You Should Never Change
“…the implications of changing your main content column width could be disasterous…”
Unless you’ve splashed out decent money for a professional blog design, the chances are you have, or you will change your theme at some stage or another, and as long as it doesn’t happen too frequently (a trap I can easily fall into), a design change can have a positive impact upon current, and new visitors.
As most of you know, I’ve just recently changed the design here, but I really hope to keep it like this for some time, except for very minor tweaks that may be necessary now and again. Changing your design too frequently can frustrate visitors very quickly. At the end of the day, 99.9% aren’t visiting to drool over your design, but to benefit from your content (which should therefore make content our #1 priority).
Allow me to cut to the chase though, as I want to warn you all that there is one aspect of your layout/design that you should never change. In fact, as soon as you begin to blog, you should make your choice and stick to it.
Quick, tell me what it is…
Put simply, never change your main content column width. This area where you’re reading this text right now should never change, even from one design to another.
But why?
Well, to be honest, the implications of changing your main content column width could be disasterous, or it might not have any impact at all. At best, it will look fine no matter what you change it to, because your posts contain no images, or ads. At worst, you’ll have to go through all your old articles and fix them, because any images you’ve used in past articles, are now either too small, or too big.
Take this blog for example. My main content width is 520px, and it always is on every blog I have. I don’t know why I decided on 520px, but I’ve used that width now for as long as I can remember. Because it never changes, the images I use in my posts never mess up, and I can use them across multiple blogs if I like, without having to resize them. If I changed the layout of this blog, and made the main content column 550px, I’d get text creeping up the side of my images, and it would just look nasty.
So, to conclude, choose a width you like, and stick to it!
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14 Responses to “One Blog Layout Aspect You Should Never Change”
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Because of you and so many others that recommend WordPress. I am starting to explore and experiment with this platform. There is a lot to learn and I am still not sure if I can pull off the technical side of having a WordPress blog. As I have commented before, you offer a lot of good advice and I am taking notes. I will let you know when I launch that first WP blog!
What part of having a WordPress blog do you think you’d have difficulty with Neena? There is a lot you can learn, I’m constantly learning, and thinking of ways to improve, but the basic needs in order to get going and keep going, are very straightforward. I’d be glad to help you in any way I can if you need it.
Neena:
I have found Wordpress to be a really easy platform for publishing my blog. I do have some technical knowledge in my background, however the tutorials on Wordpress’s main site really make things pretty easy for a first time user.
Armen:
Thanks for this great tip. At some point I am sure that I am going to mess with my Wordpress theme. I will now be very careful not to change my main content width.
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very nice info thank you
Really nice content in your post, one thing I find is that if your a neewbie like I have been it is to find someone to explain things in laymans terms.
Stuartpaul
I completely agree. If your posts usually contain things like images or blockquotes than I would reconsider any thoughts of changing the width.
О, это что-то, недавно где-то уже о таком слышала. Ваше мнение имеет основание быть. Вы понимаете то, о чем пишите. Немного почитав, хотелось бы узнать больше.
I just took a look at your blog and I think it should be possible to just widen your current template. I am not very proficient with template tweaking but if you can get someone to take a look at your template code, they might be able to fix it. Of course, going for an all new template like you had initially planned for is a whole lot easier!
I agree with this post. Stick to one pixel cause sometimes if you changed it can be quite annoying to get everything looking the way it should.
Very true. But if you have decided to change the look then you should be ready with extra hours to fix all the old pages else it would be a puzzle for your exisiting as well as new visitors.
I really appreciate your post on this topic which people often forget and make changes in their website, and call the trouble.
Thanks for sharing
Helen
Yes, this is a new feature in WPF4.0. I’m sorry that I was not more clear in my original post which version of the framework this feature is included in. I have updated the first paragraph to include this info.
I have already checked out createblog.com so i am looking for other blog layout websites!
Thanks for the nice tips here. Enjoyed reading the article. Thanks for the other links too. It was very useful for my career too.
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