Build A Blog

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First Decisions

I am up to that part of the case study when I need to find a theme for the photographer blog. Now I really enjoyed doing this I love design and it was great seeing all the different types.

Now there are lots of decisions to be made when deciding on a blog theme the first one being, am I going to pay for a professional design or am I going to look for a free theme. I’ll give you one guess which one I am going to pick….yes I am going for the free theme! There are some very good arguments for starting with a professional theme and how to get one, and you can listen to some of them here at a podcast by Yaro Starak talking to Darren Rowse about blog design.

But after considering what they had to say I have decided to go with a free theme to start with, and then progress to a professional theme a little later on. Although I realise there are always compromises to be made with a theme that is not designed to my specifications, and some free themes are better than others. But that decision was partly because of the quality of free themes I found, but I will go into that a little later I want to tell you what I was looking for first.

What is important to consider when picking a theme.

I had a fixed idea in my mind what I wanted, design is individual to everyone and what one person likes another hates. So I focused on what I like in design and what my blog needed, rather than worrying whether people will like the design.

I started by writing down what I wanted from the design for the blog, and even made a little sketch as a guide to see how different elements of the blog would fit together. Of course that brought up a lot of questions:

• Which colours to use and how many
• how many columns, left or right
• what do I want above the fold (area you see when blog loads) and is there enough room
• how was my layout going to look, where will the navigation be
• what will pages and single post look like
• will it work cross platform
• want it to look simple, stylish, modern and easy to navigate
• will photos look good on it

I wanted to make it easy to read. When reading, peoples eyes are always drawn to the top left and this is therefore a very important space on a blog, and I should consider carefully what I put there.

Where to look

If you put a search in Google for wordpress themes you get tons of answers, too much choice in fact. I started my search at the Wordpress theme viewer site, but I did do some graphic design for a while and I tend to spend too much time just looking at the themes and not deciding. So I had to remind myself to stay focused and not start nosing at all the themes. Anyway nothing jumped out at me so I moved on.

The next site I looked at was the free wordpress theme site which again has a huge selection to choose from. Also Performancing has a theme site as well with some really eye catching ones, the best feature being it has a theme switcher where you can pick a theme, and see the theme live on the site itself which is a really useful tool and good fun. It’s nice to see what they look like live, it can be hard to tell from a generic test site, with ‘this is a test site’ everywhere.

I noticed that Brian Gardner’s name came up on the last two sites I visited, he is a wordpress theme designer and has had a lot to do with the themes on wordpress themes and performancing theme sites, and he has a very impressive portfolio. I really like his designs they are clean and simple and very effective. He does it professionally but he has got some themes that he makes available to the public for free which is great. So I’ll pick one of his free themes to use and when I look to change it to a professional one, I will be going back to see what I can do with his revolution theme which I think is brilliant!

Which theme am I going with

I am going with one of Brian Gardner’s themes for the photographer blog, morning paper from the performancing theme site.

The only problem with talking about themes and what to look at when choosing one is (besides the fact I’m completely themed out looking at them all!). I have realised how much I want to change this one. It has a few glitches and doesn’t work great on the pages, so I think I have convinced myself to apply what I have been talking about to build a blog, and not leave it neglected. It should be a simple case of choosing a theme, red book again from the performancing theme site by Brian Gardner (bit of a fan) and uploading it to my host and then choosing it in the presentation tab in my wordpress admin to change it over. Famous lasts words, I’ll try to do it as quick as possible but if you visit and it all looks a bit strange you know I am eating my words!

Thanks

Mandy

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