Blogging From Scratch

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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.