This week I had the feeling of redesigning my website. Two columns and a fixed width was what I wanted to have. I’ve seen this layout on many other pages and I feel like this is the way. Altough I now have to deal with a fixed (smaller) width reading the content is now more comfortable.
### Layout ###
The layout is now based on a container layer (see Image 1), containing the header layer, the navigation layer, the main layer and the footer layer. The main layer consists of the content layer and the modules layer. This way I have a lot of control on the layout with Cascading Style Sheets, which means the amount of styling is reduced and made more clear to me (and to you, if you’re interested in HTML/CSS). When complexity is low, everyone/everything benefits from it.
### Problems ###
I still have problems related to other browsers than Firefox/Mozilla based (like Internet Explorer), that don’t like this markup that well. But this is a learning process, and I’m working around the lacks more and more. I’ve found some inspiration and solutions to this at [456 Berea Street](http://www.456bereastreet.com), which is a great site for CSS and HTML related issues.
### Modifications ###
There has been a few modifications to a small part of Mambo and a bigger part of the zOOm Gallery. The Mambo modification was just that I needed an unordered list of menu items in the top menu. Internet Explorer doesn’t like to make html-table-cells inline, though it has no problems with ul/li elements. The zOOm modifications are such that I don’t need the overlib div (overDiv) when I turned overlib off – it confuses the content layer and didn’t show everything in it. I also put the title in a special element, so I could style it accordingly. I’ll make a diff so you can reproduce those.
### Feedback ###
If you like, please tell me what you think about this design (drop me a line at the comment box). I’ll make it available as a WordPress Theme if there exists such a request.
René's Blog 