Showing posts with label footer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label footer. Show all posts

Footer

I know I'm not done with the main content part of the design (blog posts, comments, sidebar), but I really wanted to get started with the footer. Just making it presentable, and well, THERE.

For now, I just want the footer to be the place where you can find more posts of mine, however you want to find it. Whether it be by category (via an other iteration of the main navigation), by label (which I suppose is just an other way of organizing the categories, just more messy I find), or by date (via the blog archives), anyone can find something else to read once they are at the bottom of the blog page.

So, I wanted to do a simple 3 column footer. Simple,ha! No such thing as simple when your coding apparently. Unless you've done it a million times, maybe.

The hierarchy should go like so:
footer-wrapper
footer
main navigation, labels, blog archive (all side by side)

But, making a 3 column is proving to be more difficult than it should be (apparently a common problem amongst even the best designers, so I don't feel so bad now). I want them to all be equal size, so I put all width 33.3333%. And yet they appear just one on top of the other, taking 33.333% of the width still. After trying a few things with floats (one float right, one float left, but what about the 3rd since no float center...) and it still not working, I google and found that your suppose to have them display as inline-block (because divs automatically use the next line, like an enter would in a word processor, so you need to tell it not to do that) (here). It works but they are all aligned with the bottom of the container box instead of the top, weird...



If I try to put them as all float left, like someone else suggested, then the background color disappears? Fixes my top alignment problem, though. Why does it not do that with my header, then , since I use floats on everything? Cuz the last div (main navigation) is not floated?



Ok, so let's try adding an other element below those 3 columns. I think I might have read something about this way back when.



Woohoo, that worked! With a clear both added though, or else it appears below the archives widget.

One thing that is driving me absolutely MAD (as in crazy, not angry, though a bit of that too) right now is that even if I do width 100%, there is still a bit of space on either side. I do not get it. The only bigger container is body, which if I put as 100% will move the footer slightly to the right and make it bigger than the window size, and it's got no padding or margin. I specifically took the footer out of the outer-wrapper to be able to have it full width. Websites do this all the time, so what gives?!

First battle won! TBC...
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Pages Navigation

Last time, I talked about blog content organization, and I mentioned the pages bar, briefly.

To recap, I'm making a few pages, you know, those essentials that aren't quite blog content, but still essential or expected. I'm talking About and Contact, Buttons page and Parties and Features page that I decided to present as pages to free up some valuable sidebar real estate. They are nice to have, but can be quite cluttersome, so having them out of the way at the top and bottom as individual pages seemed like a smart move. I'm really hoping they will be easy to locate, especially the button page since it's less common to have them as a page, but not unseen. Well ok, I'm really still on the fence about the buttons page. It wouldn't take that much space in the sidebar section, but at the same time how many people actually use the button? TBC...

Quite a bit more unconventional is seeing a resource page and an archive/sitemap page, but I wanted to create them. The resource page because I want to give credit to the wonderful (mostly) free digital art I use around the blog; we're talking fonts, shapes, tags, doodles, paintbrushes, etc. The Sitemap I'm still a little on the fence about it, I love sitemaps for Wordpress blogs, gives an other way for people to find your content the way they want to find it (archived in chronological order, or by label/category), and includes ALL your content. Every single page.

Those are the 6 pages I'm planning. Sometimes you also see a Home tab with them, but I find that redundant seeing as the header or logo should point to the home page of a blog, or website. I really hope it doesn't confuse people, and I'll see if I need to add it later, but really the more I think of it, the more I think it's just convention for it to do that, so I don't see there being a big problem about this.

Not everyone separates their pages tabs from their content navigation tabs, but the blogs and websites that do do that have really attracted me lately. Actually, a lot of them have the pages bar at almost the very top of the blog page, sometimes above the header/logo, and then the content navigation below it. That's what I decided to do, even if I don't have that many pages, or categorical navigation to showcase.


I'd also like to have simple text links of those pages in the footer section of the blog. Websites do it like that, and I think it's expected to have links to that kind of information at the bottom of a page, too. The footer is often under utilized and neglected, but really when someone gets to the bottom of your blog you don't want that to stop them from continuing finding more stuff to read, so it's really quite logical.

Wait til you see what I have up my sleeve for graphics and coding for these bars, I'm really excited about them!!
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