New Template – NewsPrint

This is a new design that I have been working on the last week or so in my free time. I had a very specific idea in mind when I set out to make this – I wanted a newspaper look for the web. Of course, this design also had to be extremely standards compliant, and very stable.

I wanted something that would be ideal for highlighting that content, which I think I’ve accomplished with this design. If you try adding color pictures in to your content, they actually show up tons more because of the monochromatic style of the design – this is good if you create content based sites because not only is your actual text content featured, if you do use images they aren’t competing with a bunch of other images in the design.

The design is a very flexible layout, and resizes smoothly for screen size. The layout itself is a two column layout, but there are some little extras (ex: an additional section that can remain under the main column like a pseudo-three column horizontal split). However, when it comes down to it, it is a two-column design.

As is the standard for my designs, it validates to XHTML 1.0 Strict, and uses CSS for all formatting. There are no hacks used in the design. Accessibility is also looking pretty good – Cynthia says that it validates to Section 508 and WAI Triple-A standards for accessibility.

Images, nary a one. Well, actually, that’s not true, there is 1 image used as a placeholder to show you where you could put them in the content. There are, to be more specific, no images in the actual layout. There are plenty of formatting examples on the sub page for you to look at.

Browser happiness. Very cross-browser. Tested successfully in:

• Firefox (Win, Linux & Mac)
• Netscape (Win)
• Opera (Win & Linux)
• Safari
• Internet Explorer (5.01, 5.5, 6, 7)
• Epiphany
• Galeon
• Konqueror
• SeaMonkey
• Flock

Okay, so, those are the things that I normally do for a design. A main page, a sub page, standard code, few or no images, etc.. but in this case, I wanted to do something a little extra.

I created a second color theme for the design, so now you can have NewsPrint in grayscale or sepia. Additionally, I added in a print version layout for the sub pages. Plus, most of the ‘color theme’ style are split away from the main CSS, so that you can easily create your own color themes or offer alternate color themes to users. Finally, I included a little help file to get you going on some of the most basic changes you might have.

This template is free, open-source, following only the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.

Feel free to go to the main page for it where you can preview and download the layout.

As always, feel free to post your questions / comments about the design here.

I really like the way this one ended up looking, and it’s likely that I will create future versions of this one, so for now, consider this the NewsPrint 1.0 release. One thing that I’d really like to put on my priority list is to create a WordPress theme for NewsPrint. If anyone wants to volunteer, please let me know 🙂

~Nicole