Morning After: Shrink column width change quote text

  • Unknown's avatar
    solidgoldcreativity · Member ·

    Hi,

    I’m trying out the Morning After theme. I want to change two things:

    (1) on a full post page, I want to shrink the column width to about 70-80% of its current width
    (2) have quotations show as normal size text + unbold.

    Any help much appreciated.

    Thank you.

    Solid gold creativity (http://www.solidgoldcreativity.com)

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    thesacredpath · Member ·

    This is not something that can really be done without causing people to think that either someone didn’t know what they are doing or just generally messed up. The content area on the single post page is 750px. 80% of that would be 600px. What do you want to do with the 150px wide vacant lot you create that just hangs out there to the right of the sidebar?

    You can make the sidebar wider, but that introduces a page to page inconsistency in the design which is disconcerting to visitors and brings up the did they mess up or not know what they were doing question again.

    You could increase the left side padding on the post content area so that it centered the content and sidebar and split that 150px up on both sides, but then again we have page to page inconsistency.

    You can make the entire single post page 150px narrower, but again there is that pesky page to page inconsistency.

    The blockquote thing is here. The font size, font weight and font family were declared in a short form font declaration. All I did was to remove the font weight value.

    .post_text blockquote {
font: 1.3em georgia,serif;
}
  • Unknown's avatar
    solidgoldcreativity · Member ·

    Hi TSP,

    That’s exactly what I want: more white space to the right of my text column.

    It’s a principle of graphic design that there’s an optimal column width for readability. Make it too wide and it’s tiresome for readers. It’s why newspapers use narrow columns. Generally, around 65 characters is optimal. Also, white space assists readability. For both these reasons, I think this template’s default column width is too great.

    What command would you recommend for this?

    Thank you again for your help.

    SGC

  • Unknown's avatar
    thesacredpath · Member ·

    Yeah I know all about content width, but 150px of whitespace between the content and the sidebar looks bad. Try it.

    .single .primary-content {
    width: 600px;
}

.single .primary-sidebar {
float: right;
}

    You can always take the sidebar from 190px to say, 250px width, but then you have that inconsistency between pages, and you also have the fact that the whitespace on the left and right of the content and sidebar then looks out of proportion and tiny.

    Quite truthfully my opinion of the Morning after design is that it sucks. There is so much about it that screams bad design.

    Just sayin’

  • Unknown's avatar
    thesacredpath · Member ·

    You can try this as well.

    .single .primary-content {
margin-left: 50px;
width: 600px;
}

.single .primary-sidebar {
float: right;
margin-right: 50px;
}

    [rant]

    Gawd, there is so much about this theme that is like fingernails down a chalkboard to me. There is a subscribe tab in the top navigation and also one above the header image and if you want the subscribe tab up top you cannot hide the subscribe above the header unless you pay for the CSS upgrade. The search box at the top covers nearly half the width of the header area making it stand out like a flashing neon light. It’s like they needed something to fill up space and “DING!” let’s put a huge search box up there! There isn’t enough margin on the bottom of the blockquotes so that if the text isn’t as tall as the quote image, the line of the next paragraph is too close to the quote image.

    Woothemes is better than this, they’ve done very nice themes. This isn’t one of them.

    [/rant]

  • Unknown's avatar
    thesacredpath · Member ·

    You have the same width issue on all of your static pages such as your about me page as well, so you are going to have to tweak widths and margins on those too.

    If you are going to have a standard “blog” page, that is going need tweaking.

  • Unknown's avatar
    solidgoldcreativity · Member ·

    Hi @TSP,

    Haha, I get your disdain ;) Agree totally that having two subscribes is v clumsy and the search box is really prominent. Maybe they thought “mmm, it’s going to be tricky for readers to find older content here so we need to make this box BIG.”

    Agree too that the blockquotes need a lot more attention than I’ve got to give tonight. May need to come back to you about those unattractive ones.

    See, I’ve been debating about moving to this theme. What I like is the two sidebars. I like it so much I thought I’d give it a try even though other parts don’t work. If there were another theme with two sidebars I’d try that instead, but I can’t think of one.

    Anyway, I added your first suggestion and it looks OK to me, but I’ll look properly in the morning.

    Thanks as always. I enjoyed the rant too.

    SGCx

  • Unknown's avatar
    thesacredpath · Member ·

    There are a number of themes that give you give you two sidebars. You might take a look at these.

    Coraline can have one right, one left, one right and one left, two right, two left.

    http://theme.wordpress.com/themes/coraline/

    Same for Pilcrow (plus you have the full width sidebar above the two if you need it).

    http://theme.wordpress.com/themes/pilcrow/

    Elegant Grunge
    Mystique
    Structure
    Grid Focus
    zBench

  • Unknown's avatar
    solidgoldcreativity · Member ·

    Hi @tsp,

    Oh OK, I didn’t look hard enough I see. Coraline and Pilcrow are a bit neat for my taste, though maybe they can be tattered up a bit. I’ll check out the others too.

    Thanks for your help and your opinion. I really value it.

    Cheersm

    SGC x

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