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The Secret to a Great Blog RedesignOctober 30

Photo by Melisande*

Introduction

The secret is that you don’t have to hire an expensive blog designer to have a great blog redesign. While it certainly helps and makes the process much easier if you had one to work with, it would still be your responsibility in order to set the overall guidelines for the blog redesign. You need to have a direction when working towards a redesign of your blog. Without any direction you will just end up with a prettier blog (hopefully), which is fun, but does not guarantee that it will make your blog any better.

A great blog redesign starts with a plan. In order to put together a plan for your redesign, you must first reassess your goals, then figure out how well your blog is meeting your goals, and finally asking yourself whether the current design is helping your blog achieve your goals.

Let your goals guide your redesign

If you have ever tried to redesign your blog or anything for that matter, you have probably found your progress halted to a stop by little details such as does this blue or that green look better? This happens when you don’t have goals to guide your overall efforts. Little details will bog you down and slow your progress and even sidetrack you completely from the

37 Ways to Design the Comments FormOctober 16

If you are a regular reader here, you know that I put a lot of emphasis on paying attention to blog design elements that usually don’t get much attention at all like comment designs. The comments form is another one of the blog design elements that usually ends up getting rushed at the end. There really is no right or wrong way to design a comments form as long as you pay attention to basic usability guidelines. The following are 37 ways other blog designers have designed their comments form:

1. 404 User Experience Design

2. Adii

3.

Designredux Free WordPress Theme Updated to Version 0.2October 14

3 weeks after the release of version 0.1, I have finally added all the finishing touches for version 0.2 of Designredux, and it is still free. The live demo has been updated with the latest version for your viewing pleasure. Visually there has only been minor changes to the overall design. They were just little tweaks here and there to improve the look. A few odd bugs were fixed as well.

Most of the changes though are in the back end. Most notably the addition of a custom admin panel, custom pages, and it is now widget-ready. The following are the list of changes made.

Custom Admin Panel

Most of the work was done here. And most of the work means a lot of work. In order to maximize the use of the WordPress theme in version 0.1, it required you to go into the code and make some changes. With the creation of the custom admin panel, that is no longer necessary.

Navigation

In version 0.1, the navigation on top of the theme displayed al

How to Design for Ads in Blog DesignOctober 10

Introduction

Anyone who has been reading blogs for than a few days will notice that there are two common types of ads in blogs. Those two types are Google adsense, which is essentially a bunch of text with links and banner ad blocks, which often comes in the size of 125 x 125. Then there are three places it often gets placed, the sidebar, inside of a post, or at the bottom of a post.

Advertisements are a nice way of making money with blogs, but where it often goes wrong is the implementation of these ads into blog designs. Most blogs tend to just stick the advertisements right into the blog design without a second thought. This often results in making the blogs distracting, ugly, and less usable. But this does not have to be the case, there are many ways of integrating ads into blog designs without making it worst.

There is pretty much nothing you can do about the design of the ads themselves, besides rejecting the advertisers, which will only end up hurting your earning potential. Therefore the only thing you can do is to ensure that the integration of the ads into your blog design is done well.

1. Give the ads their own real estate

By creatin

How to Disassemble a Free WordPress Theme Part 2October 8

In this article, I am going to go over the rest of the files in the Designredux WordPress theme before we go on to adding extra features, scripts, and custom pages to the theme. Check out How to Disassemble a Free WordPress Theme Part 1 if you missed it.

The files that this article is covering are comments.php, single.php, functions.php, and style.css.

Comments.php

The comments contains everything required for the comments to function. This includes the comments itself, the comments form, and various checks that do different things depending on the settings set in WordPress.

1. Some pre-flight checks

if ('comments.php' == basename($_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'])) die ('Please do not load this page directly. Thanks!');

Checks to see if the comments.php is loaded directly into the browser. If it is being directly loaded, it will stop loading and display the message within the die() function. Comm