The CreativelyNanda.co.za site went through a structural refactor that touched its layouts, its print styles, and its copy rules. The developer, Nandawula Kabali-Kagwa, describes three decisions in a first-person account on DEV Community: equal-thirds layouts applied across most sections, print styles adjusted for paper and offline use, and a strict rule that bans em dashes from site prose. The account explains what was changed and why. It does not measure whether those changes improved anything for readers.
What changed on the site
Equal-thirds layouts
The equal-thirds structure was extended across the shop, the Notion integration, business archives, Poem Wall, legal pages, roots, testimonials, and imprints. The author’s stated reason is navigation. When literary and commercial content share the same site, readers need to be able to predict where things sit on a page. In the author’s words:
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“This wasn’t just a whim; it was a deliberate move to create predictable mental models for users navigating heavy literary and commercial content simultaneously.”
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The author also frames the problem as drift: “Layout drift is the silent killer of frontend polish.” Applying one grid logic everywhere is the remedy offered. The account includes no user testing, no measurements, and no before-and-after comparison, so the equal-thirds structure should be read as a design intent, not a demonstrated improvement.
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Print styles
The navy-themed pages that remained were adjusted so they print accurately. The account names three specific fixes:
- White labels on colored buttons are preserved in print instead of disappearing into the background.
- Masthead pockets on the Forge section are aligned with their wording.
- Stage-reel captions stay directly under their frames.
The author ties print behavior to local conditions: “In a region where load shedding is a structural reality, thinking about how a web page behaves when printed or saved offline isn’t a retro novelty, it’s robust engineering.” The account does not name the printers, browsers, paper types, or test method used to check the output.
The no-em-dash rule
The site adopted a strict rule against em dashes in its copy. The author’s aim is to push prose toward hinge words, pauses, and cleaner sentence lines. The reasoning is stated plainly: “From a parser and readability perspective, em dashes often act as a crutch for run-on architectural logic in copywriting.”
This is an editorial constraint the author chose for the site. It is not a general finding that em dashes reduce readability, and writers who rely on them are not shown to be making errors. Anyone adopting a similar rule will usually rewrite a dash into one of the following:
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- A full stop, when the clause after the dash can stand as its own sentence.
- A comma or a pair of commas, for a short aside.
- A colon, when the second clause explains or expands the first.
- A conjunction or hinge word such as “because” or “so,” when the dash was carrying a cause-and-effect link.
Implementation fixes
The account also records two bugs fixed during the work:
- A JSX build failure. A stray comment inside a conditional in a JSX component broke the product-page build. The author draws a general lesson: “It’s a humbling reminder that even with mature tooling, JSX parsing edge cases will catch you off guard if your components mix declarative markup with raw scripting comments.”
- CSS specificity. Escaped CSS remap selectors were used to resolve specificity issues. The account describes the approach but does not show the selectors.
Neither the code nor the commits behind these fixes are linked in the account, so a developer cannot reproduce them from the article alone.
What the account does and does not establish
The primary source is the author’s own write-up, Building for Real Realities: Why We Eliminated Em Dashes and Standardized Equal Thirds, published on DEV Community on October 1. The indexed copy does not show a year, so the publication date should be confirmed on the page itself before it is cited.
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- Not established: any effect on reader behavior, navigation success, print quality on specific hardware, or readability. The account reports none of these.
Evaluating similar conventions for your own site
If you are weighing equal-thirds layouts, a no-em-dash rule, or print styles for your own site, these are the criteria that matter. They are evaluation criteria, not conclusions drawn from the account:
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- The reader task and content mix. Does one site carry several kinds of content that readers move between?
- Consistency across page types, and whether a single grid really fits all of them.
- Print and offline behavior, tested on the printers and browsers your readers actually use.
- Implementation cost, including how much of the existing templates must change.
- Accessibility and readability evidence, gathered from your own readers rather than assumed.
- Maintenance burden, since a rule such as a no-dash policy has to be enforced in every future edit.
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