Screen Resolution and Template Size

What is the best screen resolution to target a web site template design? This is an important question for those who are interested in designing templates and also who customize templates. That is because the screen resolution is a determining factor when it comes to what your website’s visitors see and don’t see.

Firstly, what is screen resolution? In simple terms, it is the number of pixels (or dots) that make up your entire screen. It is usually expressed as the number of pixels horizontal in to number of pixels vertical. For example, a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 means that a screen can display 1024 pixels across and 768 pixels down. The total number of dots that make up your entire monitor is the multiplication of those two numbers.

It is difficult to pick one right resolution to target your template’s size. Monitors used by Internet users around the world range in resolutions from 640 x 480 (very rare now) to 1600 x 1200 or higher. Further, as technology advances and hardware becomes cheaper, more and more people will move in to high resolution monitors. According to w3schools.com, in January 2009, 96% of its visitors had resolutions of 1024 x 768 or higher. The flip side is that 4% still has 800 x 600 resolutions.

Some time ago, websites were designed targeting an 800 x 600 resolution. But now that the share of that resolution has gone down significantly, the current practice is to optimize a website design for 1024 x 768, a fact even recommended by Jakob Nielsen, the web usability guru, back in 2006.

So what’s the use of this knowledge for the regular blogger? Well, if you want to use a custom third party template or go for a modification of the existing template by adding a new column or increasing its width, check whether the resulting template fits within the 1024 x 768 resolution. You should worry more about the horizontal resolution than the vertical one. Generally, if your custom or modified template has a width of less than 1000 pixels then you can safely assume that a very large percentage of your readers can see the entire width your site without having to scroll horizontally.

565 with a Wider Post Area

Article Series: Wider 2 Column Templates - Step by Step Guides

Here are the steps to increase the width of the main post area of the 565 template by a desired amount. If you need to upload images/embed videos etc that are wider than the default width of the post column, this modification will give you more room in your posts.

1) Decide the amount of pixels by which you want to increase the width of the post area. In this article, I will be expanding it by 200 pixels. (In fact, you can pick an arbitrary size and experiment to see if that is enough for you)

2) Increase the width of the post area

• Go to Layout -> Edit HTML
• Locate the #main-wrapper CSS selector (Do a Find using your browser)
  
• Increase its width property by adding the amount of pixels picked in step (1). Here we change it to 660 by adding 200 to the default width of 460 pixels.

#main-wrapper {
width: 660px;
...
}

3) Increase the width of the outer wrapper to accommodate the expanded main wrapper.

• Locate the CSS section called #outer-wrapper
• Expand its width property by the same amount of pixels selected in step (1)

#outer-wrapper {
width: 744px;
...
}

That's it! Preview and experiment with different increments. Click SAVE TEMPLATE once you get the required increment.

You should now have more room to play around with, in your main post area.

How I got a Page Rank of 4

Today is an important day for The Blogger Guide (TBG).  Its Google Page Rank has gone up to four 4! (It might have been updated a couple of days ago, but I noticed it only today). It took approximately a year and four months to get to this level. Of course, Page Rank will not simply go up as time goes by. One needs to put a significant effort to earn such a rank and, in this post, I will share some tips about how I got there.

Content with Value

In the SEO circles, it is said that content is king. Although good content alone won’t attract much success, it is a vital ingredient. All most all articles on TBG are written after lot of research to ensure accuracy and completeness. Simple copy-and-paste type of articles don’t really add any value to the readers and also don’t give any authority to a blog.

Good content is the key in attracting incoming links, which are vital for a good page rank.

Niche Blogging

This is another advice that bloggers hear very often. It is easier said than done, but staying focus on an adequate size niche increases the value of a blog.  I used the word adequate because, if your niche is too narrow, then you can soon run out of ideas to write content.

TBG’s focus, as the name suggests, has been on Blogger. While being more specific about Blogger, I have also touched upon more general topics that all bloggers are interested, such as monetization and blog promotion.

Use of Illustrations

A picture is worth a thousand words. Being a blog about technical stuff, it is very important that what I write is easily understood by the readers. Explaining technical stuffs in simple, non-technical language, amply supported by illustrations is another reason for the success of TBG. I spend quite a lot of time in developing these illustrations either by drawing from scratch or by annotating screenshots. (See the article series on the Blog widget for example)

Offering Genuine Help

Helping Blogger users in forums such as the official Blogger Help Group, Blogger Forum and Blog Catalog etc to solve their problems was another reason. Staying focused on a niche is advantageous here because most niches have online forums of users who are interested on that topic. You must locate the most active forums for your niche and participate in them. An active forum will drive you more visitors and leaving the URLs of your articles there will count towards your page rank as well. But be careful to not to spam the forum with unrelated URLs.

Respond to Readers

I reply to my readers who leave comments or directly email me, mostly within a day. Fast responses are really appreciated by them as evident from the replies I get back. Most of them really don’t expect me to reply that soon. Responding quickly tells the readers that this is a lively blog and that it is not an old unmaintained one.

Posting Regularly

Google doesn’t like blogs that don’t update frequently. Posting new content at least once a week is also required to run a successful blog. There was a period of 3 months in which I could not write a single article, and I noticed a sharp decline in visitors during that time.

Not Relying on Short Cuts

Last but certainly not the least, I relied on working hard based on the tips listed above and did not resort to short cuts such as spamming forums or other blogs, link exchange etc.  Today’s search engines don’t just look at the link, but they also evaluate the context in which it appears. If the link appears in a meaningful and relevant context, that will score more in their ranking algorithms. In contrast, they are also smart to identify blogs that employ short cuts such as the ones mentioned above.

That's it for now. I hope you will find them useful.