Use wide content containers on your blog to increase "readability"

Having wide content containers on your blogs are an advantage when you write long posts and you may not have the option for “paginating a post.” This was a main issue when I was on “blogger” but this is a cool feature of wordpress package that I love. But this feature is cool, only as long as you use it wisely.

You can’t paginate a post of yours after a paragraph or two such that it doesn’t make much of an intro or just leaves the two-closing-lines after the “rest of this entry” point. This can be the case with some of you’re a little over average length posts. Paginating them sometimes may not be fully justified and at the same time they might seem too-long-to-read to your readers.

In this case, you may consider modifying your theme to be as wide as it can go without getting expensive on site’s look and the ability to be read, as the best option. The little over the average length posts may now look just the right length as more text is accommodated in a single line and the height is, hence, reduced.

You can widen the content container by making slight changes to the CSS of your blog but do not make it so wide that it requires one to use scrollbars to read across the site. You also have to take care that when you increase the size of the content container, it doesn’t cut into the sidebars.

For this, you have to do a little mathematics (literally little!) by varying the total width accordingly. Let me explain with an example. The theme I am using was 960 pixels wide. The content container was 440 pixels wide; the sidebars took 195 pixels each, and about 30-32 pixels blank space existed between extreme left of the page and the beginning of left side-bar, between the left sidebar and content container, between the content container and the right sidebar and lastly, beyond the right sidebar. In this way, the width of every component across the blog sums up to 960. So, if you make any changes to any of the component, like the sidebar or the content container, then you will have to vary the total width accordingly.

The stats since the launch of Inspirit Blog have shown that most of the visitors on Inspirit Blog use 1024×768 as the monitor resolution for viewing websites on Internet. Only 3-5% visitors use the 800×600 resolution. I already kind-of-hate the 800×600 mode that nowadays can be comfortably termed, “Outdated.” So, I have varied the site to 1024 pixel-width, and increased the content-container width accordingly. The sidebars are now to the extreme ends of the pages and the content stretches in between wider than before.

As I am using 1280×800 mode on my widescreen laptop and 1024×768 is not a comfortable mode to use as it makes the screen look distorted, so I’d appreciate any kind of feedback regarding the looks and usability of the modification I have made from those who are using 1024×768 resolution on their systems.