WordPress MU

Hello everyone,

I have been working over the past few days designing an mu site for school teacher websites. I teach educational technology and in the past I have set-up hundreds of customized, individual wp installs for graduate students (school teachers) to use as classroom websites.

I have created several video tutorials on that set-up here: http://www.georgetownprofessor.net/podblog/?page_id=47

I now feel comfortable enough with mu to start using it for my teaching purposes as well as offer sites for school teachers in our state.

Okay...now to my specific questions.....

I want to keep the homepage of my mu site clean and simple. The site is here: http://kentuckyclassroom.org/

I use the Kubric theme and have set the homepage to use widecolum and have changed the CSS to 700px wide. You will notice I have inserted a table on the page to get the two column layout.

Q1: Is there a better way to do this with CSS? I assume styling with css would be more accessible and browser compatible than the table I'm using? I don't really care about the table borders if there is a cleaner way to get this with CSS.

You will notice in the left column I have double lines between my links...used <p> tag to get this. In the right column I have single line breaks between the updated blogs...used the br tag to get this.

Q2: I have read that the br tag is being depreciated and is not recommended for use. I do, however, like the single lines spacing...just seems cleaner and a better layout. I plan to set the spacing in both columns the same. Is it safe to use the br tags or should I use <p> and just have the double lines? Or is there another way to accomplish the single line spacing without using the br tag?

Also, this seems to display properly in IE 7 and FF 2.0...if you see any problems in other browsers, I would appreciate the feedback.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Steve

Q1: Yes, there is. Tables are for tabular data, not layout.

Neither of those are actually proper semantics. As you are providing a list of links, you should instead be using an unordered list.

Q2: Check the W3C for more information, but I seriously doubt line breaks are going away.

Thanks...excuse the semantics...I'm not a coder...just a hacker :-)

I tried the unordered list, but would automatically get the double lines between bulleted items...and I didn't want the bullets either....seems I could only choose between a circle and square.

When I say br tags, what I actually mean is what I think is called the line break tag:

<br />

I do use line break a lot, but was under the impression it was being depreciated and shouldn't be used.

Steve

That's what a

<br />

tag is. A line break in html.

As for the list, you need to turn off the style of the list, and set margin/padding as appropriate to your tastes.

Again, check the W3C for a wealth of HTML, XHTML, and CSS knowledge.

Have you considered a book on this?

First and foremost, I would recommend designing with web standards by Jeffrey Zeldman.