If you have the technical and design know how to create and implement your own blog design, then this may be the route for you when you redesign your blog. Here are some tips and things to remember when creating your new custom blog design.
When creating your new design, keep in mind the subject matter, goals and theme of your blog. Try to match your color scheme, graphics and layout to those. If you aren’t sure how to do this, talk to someone (like your readers or a professional blog designer). Outside input can be hugely important in creating a blog design that works for you and your blog.
As I mentioned last week, a key feature to your blog design is user-friendliness. This bears repeating: “light text on dark backgrounds are very hard on your readers’ eyes. Having music, flashing text or graphics and/or scrolling text or graphics is also tough on readers’ (and their browsers).”
When working on your blog design, it’s a good idea to set up a test blog. If you’re modifying your current design, you can import that into your test blog to start. If you’re creating a new design from scratch, create it there first. Not only will this make sure that all your changes work with your blog software and layout, but you won’t risk “breaking” your main blog.
When creating your new design, go slow. By that I mean change just one thing at a time on your test blog. This isn’t just for aesthetic reasons: if you “break” something, you’ll know what caused the error. If you change six things in one edit and suddenly your test blog doesn’t work, you won’t know which of the things caused the problem.
However, be sure to try different things. I recently did a blog design with a color palette the client had chosen from ColourLovers.com. The palette was beautiful—but the way I used the colors on the page wasn’t. I could have redone the entire color scheme (which wouldn’t take that long), or changed the way I used the colors on the page, but instead I went hunting for more colors (back on ColourLovers) that worked with the “good” colors.
Other than new colors, here are some other small tweaks that can really change your blog’s feel (and the appropriate caveats):
- Font face: make sure it’s easy to read and works across many different computers (not everyone has the same fonts preinstalled on their computer as you do!)
- New header: I recommend not making the header so large that visitors can’t see at least your first post when the page loads. Also, be careful how wide you make it: not everyone has a widescreen laptop.
- Layout: If at all possible, use your blog software’s options to change the number or layout of columns
Now I think I’ll take my own advice: Readers, what do you think of this blog’s layout, colors and graphics? Are they easy to read and understand? Do they match what you perceive as the purpose, goals and theme of MamaBlogga? I’m ready for your feedback (*braces self*)!
8 replies on “Going it alone: blog design”
Good advice–and I’d make a plug for Blogger here. It gets a lot of snide comments in the blogging community but even though WordPress allows a lot of customization the Blogger templates are the easiest thing to change and there actually are quite a few things you can do. If you host your own domain and get rid of the Navbar it’s hard to tell that you’re in Blogger. At least it’s been good to me–the only complaint I have is that you can’t time-release posts as you can in Typepad but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it coming soon. They’re constantly upgrading and tweaking.
Do I sound too biased? 🙂
Michelle—ABSOLUTELY! You can do a ton of things in Blogger that you can’t do in other free blogging platforms. Despite the craziness of their made up programming language, making it almost impossible to mess with a lot of the “guts” of your blog, you can still get CSS and images for a custom look.
And Blogger is currently testing future posting: http://google.blognewschannel.com/archives/2008/02/17/blogger-adds-scheduled-posting/
I like the design of this blog. I love the tagline in script along the bottom of the page. My only criticism is that the sidebar is too busy. I understand that you want to showcase your consulting business, but there has to be away to accomplish that wit less text on the side of the page. Maybe lose the “Related Posts” and “popular on MamaBlogga” lists?
@warillever—Thanks for the feedback. I’ve taken virtually everything out of the sidebars that I can already. I used to have the related posts display at the end of the post, but I felt like that was in the way of content, whereas in the sidebar they would be less obtrusive.
But I have been thinking about at least moving the blog consulting links below the fold.
I have to say that I don’t think it’s too busy at all. Of course, if you look at my blog, you’ll see that I like more images, although I probably have too many right now. I like how your lists are all consistent as far as color and form.
If there is anything you could do, it would be to add more color, or have a background with a little bit of texture.
I have a question that you or Michelle could probably answer. Can I use an ad server like openX (OpenAds) with Blogger? I’m under the impression you have to have your own ftp server.
@Sarah—A drawback of asking for opinions: ask three people, get five opinions. 😉
You have to have more than just an FTP server for OpenX. The tech specs they list on the server front:
Server Requirements – Minimum *
Server Requirements – Recommended
To my knowledge, that’s full-on web hosting (which you can get for y’know, $7/mo).
Good article. The only suggestion I would have is to make the subscribe button more prominent by using a different color as it sorts of hides in the sidebar. Also I think having the date near the article title makes it easier for visitors to see how old the article is before starting to read or having to hunt for it. Other than that, its a great blog.
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