Design Notes

The Grid

If you’re using Evo4 CMS as a platform on which to develop a business website, and you don’t want it to look like this website (and, who in their right mind would?), you need to be pretty handy with CSS. As downloaded, the 4-column irregular grid has the measurements demonstrated in the image at left (click on image to see larger image with measurements).

Both the theme stylesheet and the Photoshop design template correspond to these grid measurements. You can, of course, alter the measurements, but you should do so on both the design template and stylesheet. For instance, if you wanted to enlarge the right page margin from 20 pixels to 30 pixels, and decided to make the sidebars 160 pixels each instead of 165 pixels to make space available for that, you would need to adjust the guidelines on the Photoshop template, and the following classes on the stylesheet: .sidebarright, .sidebar2, .sidebar3left, .sidebar3right, .rightfoot, .footer3, .footer4, .pagecontent, and .homepagecontent.

It’s possible I missed a couple of classes that would need to be adjusted in the above scenario. The point is, to modify the structure of the style sheet, please know what you’re doing with CSS.

Using headings and subheadings appropriately

H1 is used for main page headings, and h1 and h2 are used for blog post title headings (h2 is used when multiple posts appear on the same page). Therefore, subheadings (such as "Using headings and subheadings…" above) should be h3 and below. If possible, you should eliminate the h1 and h2 selections from the editor for posts and pages, so that your clients cannot select the larger headings.

The Searchbox

The searchbox is currently in the navbar. If you need all of the navbar for navigation, or just don’t like it there, you have a couple of easy choices:

1. You can move the searchbox to the header above (adjusting the header CSS)
2. You can delete the searchbox and add search to the top of the wide sidebar as a widget (only shows on blog pages)

And of course, WordPress search is not great, so you might even consider removing it altogether if you don’t consider search critical for your website.