My goal for this first week of August was, besides taking a vacation with my children, to give my blog a more modern touch. As you may have seen in the previous post, this has not been an easy task: I have been trying a large number of templates (free and paid [I had already bought them for other projects]), but I didn't like any of them for the blog. Either they were too cold or they lacked personality... the point is that I didn't like any of them enough.
Browsing through the blogs I usually read, and thinking about why I like these blogs, I realized that the design is the least important thing, what matters is that the content is quality, well categorized and easy to read (i.e. quality and usability are more important than design). I also realized that what matters is that people find interesting content and participate with their comments. So instead of using a new template, I have dedicated myself to improving the one I have been using for the last two years.
I have entered the following into the template:
- Menu with pages related to the blog base.
- A contact form.
- More categories in the articles.
- Section with the most commented articles.
- Section with links to my profiles on the social networks in which I participate.
- A tag cloud like the one my daughter uses on her blog :-). In Flash, but without it if you don't have the plug-in... so in principle it doesn't harm SEO.
- The files in a dropdown (not very SEO-friendly, but hey, I'll make up for it somehow).
- For entries displayed on the home page, more information about comments and categories.
- A footer with various information.
The footer is where I still have some work to do. For one, there are 10 pixels on the right that I can't tell where they came from. For another, I need to change the images at the bottom of the body of the posts. And for another, I tried to include the latest tweets and Facebook friends in the footer, but it didn't look right, so I disabled it and will work on it again when I have a moment.
To make the blog look different from the old one, I've changed the background color of the body of the page. I've gone from maroon to beige/sienna. I hope you like it. My kids don't like it, but I do. So for now, it's going to stay beige.
Feedback on these improvements is welcome. Suggestions are welcome too.
We talk to each other.
2 responses
Yes, it seems that the design of personal blogs is not given importance. On the other hand, there are beautiful designs for WordPress, but much more focused on corporate pages, news-type publications and showing portfolios. I just bought one at http://themeforest.net for the corporate page of Quadrant Alfa (finishing this page is the mission of this 2nd week of August 🙂
It's amazing to see what they do with WordPress templates!!!
Hello Montse:
Right at this time I am building my blog, my big initial doubt was what do I do it with WordPress, Blogger...etc... then the second step after creating my account on both sites was, and now how do they each be managed and what appearance do I give them... I have seen blogs of people who already have a presence in these media and what I see is that the most important thing is the content and about the design almost all have common elements, but the most important thing is the content they publish, which on the one hand contributes some knowledge, idea or else makes a constructive criticism of something inviting others to think about the subject that the author of the blog has posted.
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