Constantin is a wizard!

In my email this morning was an overnight note from Constantin Basturea who writes the PR Meets the WWW blog. Not only that, Constantin is the architect of the Headlines from PR Weblogs list and the owner of The New PR Wiki CEO Blogs List.

He has some great suggestions for layout ideas for my main blog. He did more than just that, though.

Constantin took those ideas several steps further by actually creating some pages so I could see what they looked like:

I tried a couple of tricks for the layout of your blog. First, I tried to see if there's a way to center the banner -- and I found one. Please see:

nevon_experimental_1.html
(the corresponding CSS is: style_1.css)

Second, I tried to replace the dark blue banner with a silver one:

nevon_experimental_2.html
(CSS: style_2.css)

But in this configuration the laptop photo looks out of sync with the rest of the layout, so I tried to align it with the right side menu (the blogroll):

nevon_experimental_3.html
(CSS: style_3.css)

The only problem I see with this approach is that the banner will stay aligned to the right, and it will not look so good on very big monitors (bigger than, let's say, 1600x1200 px). But again, few people have such monitors right now.

In my email back to Constantin, I said I'd place these files within this experimental blog as I will be looking at them quite a bit, so rather than consume his bandwidth let's consume mine.

The most interesting thing here to me is the use of style sheets. That hadn't occurred to me. When I read Constantin's email, I had one of those duh! moments. Of course - a style sheet. I think I was too wrapped up in the assumption that I couldn't do a style sheet with my Plus service level on TypePad, as you can't dive directly in to the HTML code in the template.

That's erroneous thinking, as within the root directory of the blog, I see a file called 'style.css.' It might be just a simple matter of uploading a new style sheet file to overwrite the existing one.

So I have plenty more to do now with this design experiment than I originally thought. But that's cool!

This really is a massive help. Again, Constantin, thanks for your knowledge, skill and selfless help.

(Constantin was also my 'design mentor' when I first created a blog on TypePad, last July. He had some great suggestions that helped me understand how do some things on TypePad that would have taken me ages otherwise. A wizard!)