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Blog Design Blog

Blog Design, web design, usability, tyopography, book reviews...

37 Ways to Design the Comments FormOctober 16 2008

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.

How to Dissasemble a Free WordPress Theme Part 1September 30 2008

Most articles on Wordpress themes focus on building a WordPress theme from the view point of a developer. This series of articles will instead be focused on breaking down an existing free WordPress theme and will pay particular attention to the design of the theme throughout the series. After breaking down everything, this series will focus on adding more features and improving the design of the WordPress theme. For example, topics that will be covered are creating and integrating a variety of plugins, scripts, and redesigning parts of the theme to make it even better.

The free WordPress theme that we will be disassembling is Designredux WordPress theme

I will be going over the header.php, sidebar.php, footer.php, and index.php files in this part and will cover the rest in the second part of this article.

Header.php

The header contains exactly what you think, everything on top. Basically this includes general information about the document type, the title, links to external scripts, and the navigations located in the top part of the WordPress Theme.

1. General informat

Designredux 0.1 Free Wordpress Theme ReleasedSeptember 26 2008

Name: Designredux (Don’t you just love my theme names)

Version: 0.1

Platform: Wordpress (Possibly other platforms if there are enough requests)

Live Demo: Designredux live demo

Download: Designredux 0.1 zip

A few notes

Yes, this version is really 0.1 because this theme was designed with the intention of being in continual development as a project for this blog. Basically what that means is that this theme is intended to be used as a part of a series of tutorials on coding, designing, and redesigning. By the time it hits 1.0, it will be loaded with new features and of course a redesign as it is reassesed as time goes on.

The next series of articles will focus on how this theme was built from scratch. Then after that, future articles will focus on adding more features and improving the design of the theme. If you have anything you would like me to cover in particular, feel free to drop me a message or comment.

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30 More Must See Comment Designs for Blog DesignersSeptember 24 2008

I am fascinated by the details in a blog design and comment designs are no exceptions. The comments are really the only real form of interaction between readers and bloggers within the blog, yet many blog designers continue to throw together comment designs without giving it much thought. This list continues from the other comment design list to show 30 more blogs where the blog designer puts more attention and care to the little details of their comment design and it is certainly worth it. Take a look for yourself at these comment designs.

 1.  404uxd

2. antiphrasis

3.  Avalonstar

What Everybody Ought to Know About Usability and Web DesignMay 8 2008

Even people who have no idea about usability feel the need to write articles about it to tell other people what they themselves should be doing. Usability has become a hot topic and everyone wants a piece of it by writing their own list of guidelines. Most of which end up just repeating what the other guy said. Yet even with the endless amount of articles on usability, there are still a lot of web designs that overlook easy ways to improve the usability of their design.

While there are many worthwhile guidelines to follow about usability, it really boils down to only two rule of thumbs. Those two are to make it easy to read and make it easy to find stuff. No matter what you do with your design, as long as you follow those two rule of thumbs then your design will be usable. Don’t stop there though and be satisfied. Take it to the next step and make it as aesthetic as possible and make it better all while still making sure your design follows the two guidelines.

Make it easy to read

1. Keep distractions to a minimal. This is especially important in the content area as that is where your readers will spend most of their time when they are on your blog. But that doesn’t mean you should neglect taking out anything in oth