Theme width for developing countries
Hi
I'm moving our current site over to Drupal. The site is accessed by teachers all over the world and some teachers, especailly those in developing countires, still have monitors at 800x600 res - a quick look at the stats for access shows it's about 15% of users.
The original site was fixed width at 800x600. Our new design company want to use a wider fixed resolution of 920px for the new design, as it uses 3 columns and they feel 800 res is too cramped. I'm worried about how this will effect these users still on older monitors as my remit is to cater to all users, including those in developing countries. It's been suggested by my manager that we use a fixed width of 800 for the new drupal site rather than go with the 920 width the design company want to use.
After reading up a bit on themes I'm thinking of suggesting to the design company and my manager that we investigate using a theme with a fluid width, perhaps limiting the minimum size to 720px so that we cater for all resolutions.
My only concern is that when we design the site this might make things difficult. The site might look good at the higher resolution with enough space to display the text in the columns well but look cramped for those users with the lower res. If we design site to look good for lower res then will it look bad in higher res.
Has anyone designed a theme to look good for both 800x600 monitors and higher res users and can pass on their experience? Or does anyone have any thoughts that can help me decide what to do?
Kevan
A fixed-width site that fits
A fixed-width site that fits in 800x600 browsers http://www.bbc.co.uk/
To make it more friendly for larger screens they could make it fluid width and provide easy font size adjustment.
I guess you will also want to ensure that total page load size is also constrained. 800x600 users are probably on dialup...
gpk
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www.alexoria.co.uk
bbc site
Hi gpk
Funnily enought the BBC news site is my home page and was the one we were looking at originally as an example of 800x600.
I agree that it could be made fluid to make it more friendly as I find it difficult to read on my Mac screen which is at a higher res.
Kevan
developping country theme.
hey,
we also run a website that should be accessible world-wide. gpk mentions an important concern, to know to keep page load size down. I would like to make sure that our visitors from developping countries automatically get to see our page with a theme that is stripped of all the fancy stuff (no blocks, pictures, ...).
I know there are quite some ways to localize viewers (IP-adresses etc), and to convert the site's language accordingly. does anyone know about a similar trick to automatically change the displayed theme, based on the visitor's IP?
I would be very grateful.
Joris
www.iheyo.org
If you set global
If you set global $custom_theme (e.g. in a module's hook_init() then it overrides the site's default theme (and, incidentally, any user-selected theme). See http://api.drupal.org/api/function/init_theme/5.
I guess you need to be a bit careful with this ... I know I find it irritating if the website starts making too many assumptions about what I want. Just because I live in Mumbai or London doesn't necessarily mean I have a slow/fast computer/internet connection.
gpk
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www.alexoria.co.uk
Resolutions
Hi Kevan, I am a web developer in South Africa and I come across this problem everyday, there is more than one way to approach the problem, but I suggest that you design the 920 and just make sure that the most crucial content is visible at first glance on the lower resolutions. I will speak to Bob and tell him to get rid of that pesky 800x600 resolution......good luck
Resolutions
Thanks for the suggestion and let's hope Bob gets on the case ASAP. Only problem is login and key content will be in right side bar....
Fluid Width
I haven't created a fluid-width layout in a while (please excuse my sloppy old CSS), but here's one that I did a couple of years ago: http://whatsweb20.com/
The trick comes with finding a suitable fixed width for the sidebars (between say 160-200px). Wide enough to serve the sidebar content, but not too wide to overwhelm the layout at smaller resolutions.
Margin rather than width controls the overall width of the main-content area. Then you just need to apply min-width and max-width (though some flavours of IE do not support those properties).
Fluid width
Hi Mark
This is really useful info about fixing the sidebars and a nice example from your site. We plan to use 9 regions for the new site rather over 3 columns rather than have a main-content area - maybe we can fix a min width for all regions which allow fluidity but prevent the total width going below 800.
If anyone has an example site that does something like this then posting a link here would be really appreciated. Most sites I've seen using regions (e.g. http://www.theonion.com/content/index) use a fixed width.
Kevan
tried roopletheme?
ok, I'm a year late, but have you tried the themes from roopletheme? I'm a convert by now, although it may take you a day or so to get those themes doing what you want them to do.