Comment on Stallion Responsive Theme Fonts by SEO Dave.

Stallion Responsive Theme Fonts I’m familiar with the Maths behind the golden ratio and some web designers use the precise ratio (1.618) to break the design layout into parts.

The golden ratio concept won’t work with a theme package like Stallion Responsive.

If you’ve looked under Stallion Layouts you’ll find 12 layouts ranging from no sidebars to two sidebars in various configurations.

To use the golden ratio you’d be limited to only two layout.

Left sidebar : Content
or
Content : Right Sidebar

There’s not a lot else you could do with the golden ratio for main layouts.

With a fixed width of 1000px your desktop layouts would be roughly:

Left sidebar 380px : Content 620px
or
Content 620px : Right Sidebar 380px

I’ve not taken any margin/padding into account, you’ll loose around 40px on margins/padding depending on design.

By sticking to this ratio you are limited to two basic designs. I’ve built 2 layouts that come close to the above ratio after taking into account padding/margins.

Stallion Layouts 3 and 4

3 – Main Content 660px : Left Sidebar 310px
4 – Main Content 660px : Right Sidebar 310px

I use those two layouts on most of my sites, they are aesthetically pleasing.

After taking padding and margins into account the main content shows around 640px of content and sidebars 300px.

They are not the golden ratio, they are those widths to fit what webmasters need.

640px wide main content means you can add 640px wide images and videos that won’t resize when on a desktop PC. I’ve also added image support for automatically creating 640px wide images for these layouts.

300px wide sidebars means you can add 300px wide widgets like 300px wide AdSense ads that fit perfectly. A widget area that’s 350px wide would have a lot of padding if you added a 300px wide AdSense ad, would look awful.

I wouldn’t change those widths just to hit a specific ratio, they work in the real world.

Also since the world is moving towards mobile devices and Stallion Responsive is responsive to mobile devices, the smaller the device screen harder it would be to maintain a specific ratio.

Wasn’t aware some designers where going as far as to use the golden ratio on font sizes. I used Google PageSpeed Insights Tool http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ to find font and line heights acceptable to Google (check mobile usability results).

Before making any font size changes based on a ratio I suggest looking at what the output might look like to Google via their PageSpeed Insights Tool. I assume your sources are running the golden ratio fonts, run their websites through PageSpeed Insights and check their usability ratings.

Run my site through the insights tool and you’ll see only usability issues related to offsite content

The tap target <button type="submit"></button> is only 1.1mm by 2.2mm on a typical device (7x14 CSS pixels).

The button code is Facebook like button code (not on my site) if I recall correctly.

If you decide to change fonts there’s a Stallion options page for it you probably haven’t played with yet. To activate:

“Stallion Theme” >> “Colour Options” : “Colour Scheme CSS Inline/File Creator Selector”

See changing CSS Fonts.

You can either work with the fonts inline (makes no changes to the CSS files, good for small changes or testing) or File Creator On which creates new CSS files in the Stallion Responsive child Theme folder.

With the latter option you load the default options for a colour scheme and change them on another options page under “Appearance” >> “Colour Scheme CSS File Creator”. What you change on that page is wrote to a CSS file and used like it’s one of the default Stallion Responsive colour schemes. I suggest reading the information on the pages as you go along as if you mess up you’ll need to log in using FTP to delete two files that were saved to your child theme folder.

Anyway, you will see on the CSS editor page all fonts can be changed, so if you want a specific ratio should be possible. I wouldn’t change the fonts just to hit a specific ratio, but if that’s what you want it should be possible.

David