Zones+&+Omega

So... I was having a bit of trouble trying to centralize my page and move things around in Omega... and quite honestly it was driving me crazy. However, I finally found out the beauty of those very ugly and annoying pink columns that are shown in the theme - called ZONING! Seriously, for all of you in class that are not coders or all that familiar with web design, this can be your path to redemption. This tutorial is useful for those of you who are working with Omega and I believe 960 as well. Its pretty cool and here is how it works (for a sub-theme I created for Omega; before you start this make sure to have a block for your logo under your branding section):

Lets say you want to centralize your logo - align it to your content for example - since Omega by default aligns your logo to the left. Hence, this is how my site looks now (I left the grid there on purpose... see, there are 12 columns):



To centralize I first go to Appearance> settings (for my subtheme)

on my settings page I can go to Zone and region configuration (on the menu on the left)

From this page you can pretty much set the regions (using the naming convention which is standard in Omega, and very clear in the annoying grid and blocks "visualizers"). But for the purpose of centralizing... go to your branding zone (conveniently located in the header section), set the max number of collumns to 12 and weight to 2. I left the primary region blank:

Now go to the regions> branding menu, right under the configuration drop down - set the width to 8, prefix to 2 and suffix to 2 (I left the weight to 0) & save your configurations.

And now this is how it looks:

OK, so even if you don't want to centralize your logo, zoning is still a cool feature of the omega theme ... so play around with it! It's super flexible and user friendly. I feel like I just discovered the absolute solution for all the problems in the world - and most likely for most people this is the very basics of everything. But, if you;re like me and a rookie in the art of web design, you will probably find this quite exciting!

Here are a couple of other links that might be useful for helping you out with grids: http://drupal.org/node/1440250 http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/the-960-grid-system-made-easy/