Get blog by email
My bookmarks
LinkedIn profile
Facebook profile
Blog design - what would you recommend?
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 7:47 am
Hello - welcome to my website.
On my blog I write about marketing, public relations and digital communications. To keep up-to-date with my posts you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or sign-up to receive blog posts by email.
Thanks for visiting and I hope you find my site useful.
I’m not a trained designer. I designed my own blog, but getting to a finished design was more trial and error than a well-rounded creative process.
However it’s been almost two years since I did any design work on my blog.
In that time the design has moved quite a long way away from the original look and feel, thanks to the addition of various new widgets and Wordpress plug-ins.
I think it’s time to spruce things up a bit.
I don’t have the time to fully redesign it myself and code up a new Wordpress template, but I’d like to make some changes to the current look and feel to make it look a bit more modern and easier to use.
For the record my main gripes with the current design are:
- Little use of colour - only two main colours, one of which is grey
- Too text heavy
- Not enough whitespace
- Too much information in sidebars, making them much longer than the centre column
I’d also like to introduce Ajax-based comments and search onto the site as well.
So, if you were me, what would you do to the site?
Any thoughts, advice and tips gratefully received…
Tags: blog+design, web+design, wordpres+templates, Wordpress
Comments on “Blog design - what would you recommend?”
Leave your comment
Latest links 
Links to interesting information I've spotted recently on the web:
- Councils told: embrace social networks
- Communications: Some lessons from the New Deal for Communities Programme - Communities and neighbourhoods - Communities and Local Government
- e-Published: my e-book, Brands in Networks...
- Research brief links engagement, business improvement to internal use of Web 2.0
- AskPeople: Easy, quick & simple online feedback surveys, polls and questionnaire forms
- What is Social Media? eBook on Mashable
- Cook & Hopkins Social Media Report - 3rd Edition
- What does really advanced IC look like?
- Trust, the Media & the public sector
Latest bookmarks
My most recent bookmarks from del.icio.us:
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 9:16 am
[...] post by Simon Wakeman and software by Elliott Back « Web 20 Video and Totally amazing video about the [...]
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
You have it just about right in your bullet points. I’d add to that: focus attention more on content. Your sidebars aren’t separated enough from the content. While this might be solved by the other points mentioned above, they might not too.
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
HDW - thanks for that. It’s useful to know I’m on the right lines. Will try to use white space to focus attention on the content more.
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
Color changes, even extremely subtle color changes can be used too, but white space is one of the more important factors.
A lot of people worry about too much color, or too much design, but that’s rarely the problem. Bad use of color and design is much more common. It’s one of those design mysteries that sometimes you need to add color or design elements in order to look minimalist.
Good luck.