I think I’m going to choose a new theme for my blog. The current theme is iNove (albeit an older version with some custom modifications), and I feel like it looks a bit messy and has gotten a bit cluttered, so it’s time to find something new. I like the 2-column layout, and have a few other things I’m looking for - specifically, aside from something with advanced features like lots of widget support and hooks, something that has good visual separation between different posts and widgets. I also really want something, if possible, with relative column widths. My current home and work desktops both have dual monitors, and the minimum resolution I have on one screen is 1920x1080. When I look at my blog in a maximized window, about half the screen width is wasted with empty space. So, ideally, I’d like a theme that’s based on relative widths, probably with a “min-width” property so it wouldn’t get compressed to an absurdly narrow width on small screens.
I use Google Analytics (as noted in the privacy policy) for visitor statistics on this blog (more about that in a moment). So, I took a peek at the breakdown of visitors by screen resolution, and saw that for the past year, 94% of the 27,500 visits had a screen width of 1024px or more (and the majority of the others looked like mobile device resolutions, so they’d probably zoom the page correctly). So, my first gut reaction was to assume that I could use a theme approximately 1000px wide. Unfortunately, there’s two main problems with that: first, as mentioned by Chris Coyier on CSS-Tricks.com, just because someone has a given screen resolution doesn’t mean their browser window (let alone the viewport) is that size. As a matter of fact, I usually have my main browser window set at about 80% of the width of one of my monitors, with my instant messaging client Pidgin taking up the rest of the space. So there’s one inaccuracy. There’s a potentially much greater inaccuracy in my stats as well, which I’m going to discuss in a separate post.
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