arthuc01

there are two ways – the easiest is to add an extra div so you have one div containing Blogs, links archives and categoreis and a second div with calander other and meta – the other way is to float each ul ul as a seperate block level element (fixed width) – this is a pain the @rse.
A cavaet if you do try to do a similar sort of design – be aware of the length of your menu columns – this may be an excellent place for the drop down archives/categories we were discussing with theglobalguy
https://www.ads-software.com/support/11/6672

Lovely site, like MaxT says they header graphic is great…there was some bizarre article on BBC News 24 a few weeks back that was trying to claim that Knitting was the new gardening (in the same way that brown is the new black)

Thats brighton pier isn’t it? I thought it had fallen into the sea? I love that great british sky where they grey sky merges into the grey sea….

I like it, its tasteful and in tune with the minimilistic vibe I’ve got going on at the moment ??
One thing I would say though is that the background of the content section completely obscures the mountains until you get to the comments and you may want to notch the header contrast up a tiny wee bit and don’t forget your lovely tasty spider food (meta tags)…

Just a quick wee visit before I go to bed….
Root – glad you like them – i’ll have a wee look at your header in the morning – this could be an interesting challenge.
Oisin –
1. I only worked out that one column was for a journal and one was for writing after reading a few posts – most people won’t take the time and there needs to be some sort of clear indication of whats what
2. A personal taste thing – like I say I’ve used the same colours in a site before – i’ve moved on (I’m in my light and minimilistic phase at the mo ?? ) but I can’t criticise
3. “Name/time isn’t important” well why bother having it then? – if he’s the only author and he only posts one posting a day then i’d agree that its unnecessary – but he’s chosen to have it on there so its obviously important to him at the time being
4. I’m not sure if que/queue is the word I’m looking for but what I mean is essentially a visual signal to help orientate the user on the page and with a task. A good example of the idea is the underlining of links. (An explanation thats as clear as mud ?? )
5. The ones that caught my eye were the category labels
I would agree with you (Oisin) about the swirls and I do feel that the meta data should be moved up – but personally I would put the adsense bar horizontally at the top of the page

theglobalguy – glad you like the mock up (i wasn’t sure if I was over stepping netiquette) – As I said I chose the colour scheme based on one of your photo’s but what you could do is via the magical power of css have a different header&background for each category (using the body id) so you can have an antartica theme along with a USA theme along with an african theme etc… each based on some of your favorite photo’s- but maintaining a consistant page structure throughout (just a thought). eg…
https://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/01/16/body_ids
As for the whole two/three column thing it depends on personal preference really – I’ve always prefered two columns but its often necessary to use the third if you have content that demands to be there – the best thing to do is to think about your audience – mostly friends and family from your comments so what would they like? are they perhaps elderly and would prefer a larger font size which would demand more screen real estate?

Nae probs hen

Root – thanks, I wasn’t sure how it would go down to be honest
Podz – I’ve just come across …
https://www.ads-software.com/support/3/5661
which discusses doing a drop down archive list. – could be very handy here. It does use an onchange event to change the page which I’ve never been sure about the accesibility of .

Thats actually a really good idea Podz – space saving yet functional ?? – but is there an easy way to set up archives as a drop down list in WP?
As for the temperature it does make scotland seem toastie warm….

Thats not quite what I was trying to say Podz – content is always king (to use the cheesy overused phrase). By my poorly phrased comment, I didn’t mean that design should be more important – just that the design used here is a fairly standard one (not bad/not brilliant) but thats its nothing to worry about because the images and text are more important. (hope that clears things up a bit ?? )
The following is NOT meant to be further criticism…but if it comes to how I would do this site design wise if it was mine then I’d probably go for something a bit like (a five minute photoshop mockup)….
https://chris.lineages.co.uk/mockup1.jpg
Taking one of theglobalguy’s excellent photo’s as a header graphic – with site name in simple white text losing the embossed effect of the old header and using simple grey bars to give separation with the main body.
Then using the header graphic colours I’ve selected a couple as the basis of the other colours in the scheme – eg the vibrant blue background, the dark blue header colours.
In my mockup I’ve also decided to lose the world map background – which takes quite a long time to load over my wee dialup – to leave a simple white background for the text which is a dark grey rather than black which can sometimes be a bit too harsh
And obviously I’ve included the ubiquitous drop shadow ??
One problem with the two column version is that henry is quite a prolific writer and has archives going back years – which could lead to the column being too long – in that case I would go for a selective cull of the contents of the side panels eg pull together the lonely planet and meta data would give you less – losing the weather could be an option – or changing the archives into annual rather than monthly sections (???)

ditto

Your not referncing your elements correctly so To fix your CSS problem change….
#lh-col #rh-col, ul
{ color: #CCC;
font-weight: bold; margin-left: 5px;
padding: 3px 0; }

#lh-col #rh-col, ul li { background-color: #D3D3D3;
border-bottom: 3px solid #B0B0B0;
border-left: 3px solid #B0B0B0; border-right: 3px solid #B0B0B0;
border-top: 3px solid #B0B0B0; color: #404040;
font: 12px "Trebuchet MS", "Times New Roman", serif;
letter-spacing: 1px;
margin-top: 5px;
padding: 4px 0 0 5px;
}

#lh-col #rh-col, ul ul { background-color: #E0E0E0;
border-top: 1px solid #B0B0B0;
font-size: 14px; line-height: 100%;
margin-left: -5px; padding: 6px 0;
}
#lh-col #rh-col, ul ul li { background-color: #E0E0E0;
border: 0;
font: normal normal 70%/115% 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Verdana, sans-serif;
letter-spacing: 0;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;}

with…….
#lh-col ul, #rh-col ul
{ color: #CCC;
font-weight: bold; margin-left: 5px;
padding: 3px 0; }

#lh-col ul li, #rh-col ul li { background-color: #D3D3D3;
border-bottom: 3px solid #B0B0B0;
border-left: 3px solid #B0B0B0; border-right: 3px solid #B0B0B0;
border-top: 3px solid #B0B0B0; color: #404040;
font: 12px "Trebuchet MS", "Times New Roman", serif;
letter-spacing: 1px;
margin-top: 5px;
padding: 4px 0 0 5px;
}

#lh-col ul ul, #rh-col ul ul { background-color: #E0E0E0;
border-top: 1px solid #B0B0B0;
font-size: 14px; line-height: 100%;
margin-left: -5px; padding: 6px 0;
}
#lh-col ul ul li, #rh-col ul ul li { background-color: #E0E0E0;
border: 0;
font: normal normal 70%/115% 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Verdana, sans-serif;
letter-spacing: 0;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;}

Apart from that the design is okay, i’m not a huge fan of such a bright blue and I think the photo montage header and text let down the site – but its a fairly standard blog where the images and text is more important.
I’ve also noticed that your right hand column overlaps the center by 1px.
If you want a hand with the design/header I’m a bit bored so feel free to drop me an email
McC

Just added “Cow” Theme – quite a simple fun wee template…
https://chris.lineages.co.uk/Wordpress_template_index.php
Hope ya’ like it…..

Mine is Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional (although the MySql servers not working at the moment – so you won’t be able to check) – for me it means a couple of things…
1. Easy of coding – your not flinging about alot of useless tags
2. Updating – to change my site design to the current one required the addition of ONE extra div to move from two column to three column and coding with CSS is quicker (IMHO)
3. Semantic coding (although not quite the same as having validating code) means that I rank higher in search engines – it also improves accessibility (for the most part – those idiots using Images OFF CSS ON may have a few problems)
4. So long as you restrict what tags can be used in your comments and you yourself don’t start going and putting in invalid tags etc then you’ll be fine – so far I haven’t found a comment breaking my site
5. At the moment browsers are still quite quirky eg IE’s CSS rendering problems and also PDA’s that parse the screen CSS rather than mobile CSS but in the future as more browsers become compliant there will be more importance on having valid code (HTML4 or XHTML)

nice site mate – one little nigle 1px error with h3 in firefox