Blogging Pro has an interesting analysis on various CSS Optimization tools that are helpful in making your site load faster. The tools tested are CSS Optimizer, Icey’s CSS Compressor, Flumpcakes CSS Optimiser, and CleanCSS out of which the winner is Icey’s CSS Compressor.

I tried Icey’s CSS Compressor and got my CSS compressed by 45%. But when I tested it here, I found the layout completely broken.

So for me the winner is CSS Tweak, which works perfectly even though it compresses my CSS only by 30%.

Which CSS Optimizer works best for you?

Yesterday I modified my post dates to look like this:

This is a Mod by Steve and he has provided excellent instructions on how to do it for K2 r167 and it’s nightly builds here.

One of the reasons I applied this Mod to my current design is that I feel the date stamp makes each post stand out.

Those of you interested in K2’s Live Search feature can try out Steve’s K2 Live Search Mod. I haven’t tried the Live Search Mod yet as I have disabled all Live features from my K2 blog to decrease page load time.

Have a nice time modifying K2

The screen resolution 800 x 600 pixels has signficantly decreased since July 2005. More and more internet users choose for screen resolution 1024 x 768 or higher. The finding has important implications for web site designers because most web sites are designed for a screen resolution of 800 x 600 pixels. 1280×1024 is #2 in the world.

According to my Google Analytics stats, most of the visitors here are also on 1024×768. Actually, I think it’s good news because I don’t think my current 3 column theme would display well on resolutions of 800×600 or below.

via OneStat

Today let us look on how to make your blog’s visitors read your old posts by customizing K2.

Check out Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 before reading this.

Continue reading ‘How to create a custom K2 Scheme: Part 4′

Yesterday I explained on Menus and how to customize them. Today let’s take a look at a few more things. You may want to read Part 1 and Part 2 before continuing.

Continue reading ‘How to create a custom K2 Scheme: Part 3′

Yesterday I explained on how to customize the body, page, header and footer. Today I shall cover on how to customize the main menu of your K2 blog. If you have missed the first part of this series, please read that before you continue.

Continue reading ‘How to create a custom K2 Scheme: Part 2′

K2 is a wonderful theme for the Blog Platform- WordPress. Before modifying it you need to know the basics of XHTML, CSS and PHP. You can find good tutorials for these on the net. A good introduction to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can be found here.

Continue reading ‘How to create a custom K2 Scheme: Part 1′

I have mentioned here a few mistakes that are commonly made by web designers:

1. Frames: A few years ago, frames were the in thing. They allowed one or two parts of your site stay constant while only one frame changed.As a result people used to use them for fast loading of pages.But with the growing popularity of search engines, it became a known fact that Framed sites were not being properly indexed.

   When a search bot visits a site with frames it indexes only the main frame ignoring all the other frames, leading to sites with frames dropping rapidly in search engine rankings. This is one of the reasons why frames are no longer popular.

   Another reason is that bookmarking a site with frames is not easy.

Continue reading ‘Common Web Designing Mistakes’