Blogging From Scratch

As you can see the new theme is in effect. This is the conclusion of this series however as you will notice that this theme is far from finished. I am putting it live so that through the upcoming edits I can explain the methods I use to accomplish the tasks.

Never done..

Since this blog is a very much evolving resource for bloggers worldwide the design will also continue to evolve. The purpose of every change is to somehow create a better experience for the user. Sometimes this works out great and other times it doesn’t work out so well. The good news is that you can help create a better experience for yourself by letting me know what you think. I can’t promise to take all of our suggestions but I will most certainly give every comment some thought.

Upgrades!

Just a few days after I upgraded WordPress, version 2.7 was released and thus I upgraded again. This was good timing as I will not have to port over any code to 2.7 (although, I’m not sure I would’ve had to anyway). I also upgraded all the plugins that I use on this blog.

Theme Switcher

Theme Switcher, this is mainly in response to a comment by David who asked what you could use while developing your theme so that your users won’t see an unfinished product. What I did at first was work on the theme on another installation of WordPress. I did this so I could be sure I made a portable theme. It’s easy to statically put anything on your theme so by using another installation I was forced to use the pre-built WordPress API to dynamically retrieve different variables such as the Blog Name. Once I got the basic theme done I then carried it over to Blogging From Scratch. Since, there were still many customizations to be done I needed away to view the theme without anyone else seeing it. I found an easy way was to install the Theme Switcher plugin and then manually set the theme to my development theme through the address bar of my browser.

Site Updates

The launch of this theme is the kick start to many changes that will be taking place on this blog. As many of you pointed out, the goals you set out for yourself may change and in this case it certainly has. Instead of putting forth a marketing plan I am holding off on that until I get a little farther in the development of the blog.

Some major features you can expect are:

• Resources, this will include Wordpress Themes, Wordpress Plugins, as well as other nifty resources that you may want to utilize on your blog.
• New category structure, although this has already started there will be much more done in this area. I want to make it easy to find different types of posts on this site. There will be posts about the site such as monthly goals, resources that I explained above, as well as articles. The articles will be sub-categorized to different subjects such as monetization and development.

Over the next few weeks I will be posting articles about specific elements in this theme that I will be working on. I will show you exactly how I completed the task and how the blog benefits from the task. I hope you all enjoy!

Contrary to the previous post I felt the urge to take a little more time in the design phase. What I wanted to do was create a layout that allowed me a lot of flexibility content-wise. My reasoning is I want to keep up with providing good content to my readers and to do that I will have to spend less time developing and more time producing content. I already know that time will be short in the coming months so I decided to put some effort into this now so that in the future I will be well setup.

This is a great example of how a design can evolve over time. What you will see below is a color scheme change which I feel is more suitable and “friendly” I think it also gives me more flexibility with adding different colors while still having the design blend nicely. I also added a lot of details to give the design a more finished look. I’d also like to note this is the homepage design, content pages will have another design to allow more content to fit within the layout. The last thing I wanted to point out is that you will start to notice a lot of ad placements. The reason I am doing this is not to overwhelm you with ads but to give you ideas on how to monetize your blog.

From here I will start to integrate the design into Wordpress. The next post in the series will go over the integration and will be posted in the new theme.

In our last post we figured some things out through some careful thinking. Now is the time to take those thoughts and execute them.

Layout

For this re-design, the layout is pretty much given to us. We are basing our new design off of the current theme so we pretty much will follow the same layout. For our reasoning, check back to our first post. I did make some layout changes, just for my preference and to make the design seem a little less cluttered.

Colors

Colors are a really hard topic to cover. There are so many possibilities and an infinite number of reasons why to pick any color in the spectrum. Whether it be branding, psychological reasons, or just plain aesthetics, there is no doubt that colors are one of the most important and influential aspects of any design and thus should be given an appropriate amount of thought and consideration. I chose the colors for this design for one main reason, to continue with the branding of Blogging From Scratch. These colors are similar enough to the original theme that it will still be recognizable.

The Details

As you can tell the design is rather simple. My main goal for this iteration is to give me a basis for future development. Keeping the design simple, clean and very usable allows me to easily implement new blocks of content, or new features. You’ll also see that it does not include every element. Usually I would design every element in my mockup but for this situation I will not waste the time. There are a few reasons for this, one I am the client so I know what I want, and two it will save a lot of time.

The Preview

In this series I’m going to chronicle the re-designing of Blogging From Scratch. I think that you’ll be interested in my thought process and maybe even pick up a few tips along the way.

Why Re-Design?

There are a few reasons why I want to re-design Blogging From Scratch. Mainly, I don’t like using pre-made templates for any of my websites. I just like to make things that are unique. It’s a personal preference and it does have it’s benefits but a unique design is not essential to a good blog.

When I acquire a new website I always try to re-design it to represent myself. I feel that changes of ownerships are a step forward for a website. A new design will help distinguish the fact that there has been a change. Of course there are some cases where the original design represents the site so well that changing it would hurt the website instead of helping it. I feel that in the case of Blogging From Scratch, a re-design would be a step forward.

Considerations

Before getting to work I always take some time to think about the project. This site has some pretty interesting considerations in addition to some of the more obvious ones. With all design work you of course want to think of the basics such as color, font, layout, etc. I won’t get into too much detail on those types of things here, there are many different resources on the web for that sort of thing. What I wanted to point out where the things you may not have thought of before.

The first thing I needed to consider was the current advertisers. This is the source of the blogs income, they have already paid for a certain amount of time and I can’t just take their ads off or move them to a place where they did not pay for. With this in mind I already saw that the layout of the new design had to be very similar to the existing one.

In Wordpress different themes can be using different widgets. I have to be sure that when creating the new theme I stay as close as possible to what is already existing. This will help avoid any conflict or loss of content when switching themes. At a later date I will actually go through all the plugins and such and start adding or removing different features as I see fit but at this time I just want to have a new theme up that I can work with.

The biggest thing I think in any interactive design, which includes websites, is the usability factor. I aim to create something that is clean, simple and easy to read so that my readers will enjoy reading the blog and easily find the content that they want to find.

Plan of Action

Alright, I now have thought things out. I did want to point out that even though I have thought out what I wanted to do with the project things are bound to change. Whether I run into a roadblock or if I just think of something better you should never constrain your creativity by your planning.

Now I can think of a plan of action. Since I want to keep basically the same theme but just want to re-design some elements I decided it was best to use the current theme as my starting point. By doing this I already have a lot of the code ready for me and I just have to add my own style to it.

This is where we’ll stop for this post. In the next post we’ll start the actual design work.

I like to have something called a post warehouse. A post warehouse is basically a number of posts written to be published on rainy days. No, not literally rainy days but days where writing a good quality post just isn’t going to happen. We all have lives outside of the internet and blog world (shocking, I know) which brings us unexpected circumstances, emergencies, or just times where we have other priorities that come before our beloved blogs.

Whether it be an emergency, a planned vacation, or maybe you just get in a very lazy mode at times, writing a post just might not be your top priority. This is where the post warehouse comes handy. Since you have a bunch of posts already written you can simply publish them during the times that you just don’t have the time to write a post. This is beneficial in so many ways but let me throw out a few points on the subject.

You might be thinking, if I have the time to go and publish it I can do a quick post. Sure, it doesn’t take much to write a small post but what the post warehouse does is allows you to continue to publish quality posts rather than small quick posts.

Or you might think not posting for awhile won’t be too bad. Well, you may be right. Skipping a few days might not hurt your blog, especially if it’s well established. There’s two things I want to point out here. One, sometimes your one week hiatus can turn into a month long hiatus and then longer, life brings some unexpected times. Two, every day that you make a post your traffic will be significantly greater than days that you don’t. For example, those who have subscribed to your RSS feed will know when there is a new post and come to your site to see the new content. Keeping your traffic up daily will just mean more revenue for you, whether it be more enticing to advertisers or just more impressions on your PPC (pay-per-click) ads.

Having a stockpile of posts ready for publishing is not a necessary requirement to run a successful blog, it just makes it a little bit easier.