Forum:Revised Main Page & Skins

Bingo! See my latest draft Main Page at User:BadCatMan/Main Page 2015/spread (Monobook and Oasis). As before, it will be badly arranged in Oasis/the main Wikia skin.

I grabbed the new scroll-banner to form a lovely, flavourful and eyecatching intro front and centre. This gets rather distorted on very small screens and windows, being either compressed until the letters fall out or the ends are cut off. I suspect this is an issue of me using pixel measurements rather than EM or percentages, so I'll need to revise these.

I bolded the text over the banner, as it got a little lost in the background scroll texture.

I found a way to make the Main Page article window transparent (in Monobook, at least), so I could display the map as a background texture, seamlessly with the surrounding background, i.e., laying the current Main Page boxes over the top of the map. The results were pretty impressive, but unfortunately, it carried on to edit, talk, history, and so on, which all looked awful, with text laying directly over the image. In addition, without being connected to a clear page, the top tabs in the Monobook skin floated uselessly. Thus I stuck with the default style. One day, I hope to get this working.

So, since white had to be the background, I removed the old brown background and went with the "no-boxes" style for feature content (the boxes are still there for later use, just unseen). Though maybe not as clearly delineated, it's a cleaner, more efficient arrangement.

Thus, instead, I knocked up some mock wood-and-parchment panels for the sidebar and bottom section to delineate them. Frustratingly, using the groove/ridge border effect, when you specify a colour, it divides it into lighter and darker versions, and you don't get a lot of choice over these. My attempted wood border looks too light and pinkish in Firefox (what I use), but looks great in Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Android.

With the background image in the margins in Monobook, the white background isn't so jarring. The white background also makes the empty space in the right corner (all Wikia wikis suffer that) seem less empty, ironically. I hoped to find a fluff image to fill this with, maybe one of the Celtic-knotwork-and-dragons designs that adorned some 2nd edition sourcebooks.

Ultimately, the styles mimics that of articles themselves: notice in the top banner, in-universe content in the main whitespace, details in the sidebar, and crunch and links down the bottom. I'm quite satisfied with it now. Any complaints, problems, or suggestions before I make it live? — BadCatMan (talk) 08:09, October 18, 2015 (UTC)