The old saying, “don’t judge a book by its cover” doesn’t necessarily translate to blogs. The first thing people see when they visit your website is, well, the cover. Or rather, the design, look and feel of your blog. What does your blog’s theme say about you and what you want to be known for?
A good theme should match your blog’s content, showcase your blog’s personality and give off clues to the reader about what kind of blog it is. If you have a business blog, maybe you just want it clean and simple. For a fashion blog, you might want a more stylish theme. For a creative blog, you may want something a bit more artsy. A good blog theme should also make your blog easy to read. Many blogs have dark or multicolored backgrounds that make it hard to read the most important thing: your content! At least if you have a dark background, make sure your font color is white. My benchmark for all my blog designs is for them to be clean, simple and reflective of the content I want to share, all the way down to the types of headers or logos that I put at the top.
Today’s assignment
Tweak your blog’s theme using free tools or upgrade to a premium theme. You may want to completely switch to a new theme, or just change your font colors. Whatever you do, just make sure your new design or modifications make your blog both readable and pleasing to the eye. Try to look at your blog from the perspective of a new reader or, even better, ask someone else to take a look at your blog and give you some honest feedback!
Here are some resources for free and premium themes that you may want to explore and test drive on your blog. Want more theme ideas? Just ask Google 
Blogger
- Blogger Template Designer (found in draft blogger: http://draft.blogger.com)
- 101 Awesome Free Blogger Templates
- Deluxe Templates: Professional Blogger Templates for Free
WordPress
- WordPress.com (the free version of WordPress is home to 100 free WordPress themes)
- WordPress.org (the self-hosted version of WordPress is home to over 1,000 free WordPress themes)
- Headway Themes ($87, this is the most customizable theme on the market and their support forums are top-notch) for self-hosted blogs only
- WooThemes – Premium WordPress Templates ($70 buys you 3 themes for the price of one and a great support forum) for self-hosted blogs only
- Elegant Themes ($39 for unlimited access to all their themes and support forums) for self-hosted blogs only
- Themeforest (themes range from $27 to $37) for self-hosted blogs only
I already spent a lot of time modifying my theme on WordPress.com with a free template and a banner I designed using Gimp.
I really recommend “2010 Weaver”, it has a lot of options that are easy to customize and its very simple if you need to modify some of the codes. Also, the theme’s website has a lot of support content.
Its a clean and simple theme that builds on the original wordpress “Twenty Ten” and is very reliable.
For my mobile theme I went with “Carrington Mobile 1.1 by Crowd Favorite”, here too it is customizable and has a few backgrounds to choose from. I have viewed it on my iPod touch and it looks great, I have not seen it on other mobile dices yet. If anyone wants to give me feedback would be greatly appreciated!
The only thing Im not 100% happy with are the section titles on my menu bar. I want to reorganize the articles and title the categories in a more original/fun way. Any suggestions?
didn't do too much changing to the layout, but i did change the font, and the colors to go more with the background and to be a little bit easier on the eyes. I like the rustic feel of my blog especially since it's talking about history, so the parchment look works for me right now. But who knows, I may update it to something totally different in the future as it grows.
I don't know if I read it here or elsewhere in researching blog accessibility, but I believe that for some reader assistance technology, blogs are read left to right (much how we read books) and to that, if you'll have a lot in your sidebars and go to the left with the sidebar, there's a whole lot of data the assistive technology has to wade through before it gets to your actual reader content. If you don't anticipate having heavy sidebar content, then I like the new theme you are considering.
Bernadette
http://www.b3homedesigns.blogspot.com
http://www.coloredwhite.blogspot.com
Thank you Bernadette for your feedback
I really appreciate it.
I just read your blog, Colored White, the post about your brother and it really touched me. It has put a human perspective on something that we as outsiders often do not always take into account when we talk about Afghanistan…I'll be keeping up to date with your blog too.
Cute blog. Feedback to take or leave…
I'm very visual and detail/design oriented too. For me (and maybe just me), I'd love for your header photo to either span the width of the overlay page or be stacked the left corner. Centered and “floating” up top seems a little disconnected for me. Really minor thing but for me, it would connect the title of your blog to the content.
I really love your blog. I think there is something to be said for simple, with less widgets. It was really easy to read your blog and the focus is on your writing (and some really fantastic photos – LOVE your header). Nice balance of professional with a personal passion for the work. I'll be adding you to my bloglines.
Bernadette
http://www.b3homedesigns.blogspot.com
http://www.coloredwhite.blogspot.com
Getting caught up here. Just started the http://www.b3homedesigns.blogspot.com and that one I think is good theme wise for right now. Or at least I've told myself it is okay and I should focus on actually posting to it.
I do want to update to a theme with a nav menu of some sort so that will be the biggest tweak I make. And streamlining all the sidebar goodies in prep for posting advertising/sponsorships.
I've wanted to update http://www.coloredwhite.blogspot.com for some time now. I just spent a whole bunch of time looking through the great resources and have downloaded some themes that I think I might give a go. Have to do a little more google searching on the how to of it all, but hope to have an updated theme by this time next week.
I finally went ahead and invested in the theme for my professional blog. Still working on content, but here it is…Feedback welcome!
http://www.tanyasimpson.com
I also spent a considerable amount of time looking for just the right theme and look for my blog. I'm still not 100% happy with it. I'd like to have a more attractive header, for example, perhaps even a logo, and I'm still not happy with how thin the right column is and feel that I could add more useful widgets.
At this stage in the game though (when I'm pretty broke and my blog is still growing), I feel pretty comfortable leaving things as-is for now. I look forward to our discussion of widgets later on though.
Thank you Charron! This is very helpful feedback
I spent most of the first month on my blog obsessively tweaking, it was frustrating and fun both at the same time. Tumblr is quite limited in the widget department which is actually quite frustrating. For example I would like a blog roll in the right or left hand side column but tumblr does not have this feature and to code it into your theme requires a degree in web developing.
I wanted a simple theme which allowes the content to do all the talking. Any feedback would be much appreciated!
http://www.aneldagrove.com
For easy clicking…
http://employedpanache.blogspot.com/
I actually put a lot of thought into my theme when I started my blog. In fact, you could say I was a little obsessive over it. Because I'm so visual and detail oriented, I couldn't write without it being near perfect
My goal was to get it stylish and professional looking… any feedback is greatly appreciated!
Hi Charise
On your current theme I actually like the logo/header section but the body portion (especially the white font on grey background) was hard to read. I do like the new theme that you are considering. Looks professional but still fun
I don't think I like my WordPress theme for @fuseDC anymore. Should I keep it or loose it? I especially don't like that I can't get the logo to integrate better with the header. I'm thinking about switching to this theme: http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/buddypress-s…. Any opinions?
I haven't updated it in a while, but here's a list that includes some of the WordPress widgets I've used and liked. http://socialsourcecommons.org/toolbox/show/2179. When I add the more recent widgets to this list I'll post to my blog that its been updated: http://fusedc.org/blog
yeah, i'm still experimenting with the themes to see how i like them. what about this one? http://elledub08.wordpress.com
i'll likely just go back to my old them lol
I had planned on redesigning my blog headers last week with fresh new photos of myself. I had to postponed my photo shoot. That would be my true tweak and hopefully I can get it done very soon. Until then I added a welcome sticky post and cleaned up my sidebars.
Thanks for sharing info about the free blog review. I just went to the site and signed up.
I spent quite a bit of time going through themes, and I ended up sticking with the one I have now. It's simple, minimal, and keeps the focus on the writing. The theme is “Unsleepable” by WordPress.
For my blog, I messed around with some other themes but did not find one which I liked better so I stuck with the one I recently changed to at the beginning of July. I think that once I host my own blog (coming soon) I will feel like a change is needed.
http://npgold.wordpress.com
I liked your other theme better, too, although neither one of them quite say “black girl blogging” to me…
Yes, the popularity does raise a concern about standing out if the site looks like many others, especially in the same niche. But, as you say, nice and clean out of the box, and easy to add widgets to as well.
iNove is a popular theme – I see a number of folks in the challenge using it. I like the clean look & nice to know it looks like that right out of the box.
I use iNove, a theme available on WordPress.org – http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/inove. Pretty much use it out of the box and, for now, I like it. It's clean, easy to make simple modifications for a non-PHP theming type like me.
I've been looking at some of the WooThemes and might head in that direction, but iNove is giving me what I need for now.
I'd like to add another resource for WordPress blog redesigns, and that's http://freecsstemplates.org.
It's where I found my blog theme (Bamboo) when I redesigned in July. Since I just did a redesign, I'm not going to do anything for this particular one.
If you need ideas around photos or typology, check out my enjoysthin.gs feed, http://wildwomanfund.enjoysthin.gs.
Thanks for helping us figure out how to better reach people through the use of good design!
I also went to http://AspiringFempreneur.com and had Cheryl do a free blog review for me! She measured how easy my site was to navigate, how easy it was to read, if I could do anything to help my readers trust me more, checked out my Alexa ranking, etc, and then checked back in to see how my ranking improved after I did my redesign. My ranking went from 1,700,000 to 900,000, which is a really good jump! Highly highly recommended. And free!
Mazarine
At first I said I wasn't going to tweak my theme, but then my ADD kicked in and I just had to change it up. I changed the layout, the font, and rearranged my widgets. However, I am working with a designer to get a personalized template, so when I do that it'll change again anyway. Right now, I just decided to have a solid color background that matches the picture banner that I have as title holder. I feel so vain. LOL. Have a great week everyone!
http://www.myhairisme.com
Ok, I am not taking part in today's challenge as I just “tweaked” my site by changing the background, the fonts, and the format as well. I still need to work on the format, as Im still not completely pleased with it, lol.
i changed up the theme though i think i liked my other one better…..what do you think?
http://elledub08.wordpress.com/
Blindsided by WebGuy again… my login information for wordpress that works on my site 4RIISE.org, to add new posts/edit, does not work on wordpress site.
I was looking forward to this challenge. As I mentioned in Day 7 comments (venting post), I felt my blog page design was flat. So I was excited about going to wordpress to find and implement a new design… I must now wait for “you know who” to come back from travels and respond…arghhh…
Needless to say, I am not blogging about these last two challenges, not because I don't like them or that I am not up for the challenge, but I am limited in the process right now. A tad bit frustrating therefore not easily transferable into something meaningful for my blog community…The plus side is that I am now caught up with challenges, via attempts
We'll be working on widgets soon as part of the challenge
Tweaked! Like Tanya, I am also unsure of the most effective widgets. Do you have any advice?
Alrighty! The theme has been tweaked! I'm still deciding on which widgets are most important to display, so I'm sure this will change.
http://tsworkinprogress.wordpress.com/
I've actually spent a good amount of time reviewing my blog's theme. I started off with Koi but it just didn't feel right (even though a few people told me they really liked it). I'm currently using the wordpress theme Bueno. It's pink and light and fun without being too girly. I like the font and the fact that it has the 3 footers at the bottom of the page (enables me to separate my blogroll, badges and twitter feed). I think it really says Candy Shoppe.
I spent this morning browsing all my pages to make sure they are easy to read and appealing. Even used my blackberry to see how the blog comes across on a smart phone.
I really do like the theme so I don't plan on changing it.
But your thoughts/comments/suggestions are greatly appreciated.
http://thecandyshoppe.wordpress.com