Daniel Scocco talked about adding drop shadows to images to give them a slightly more 3 dimensional appearance on a blog page. For those of you that aren’t aware, drop shadows is done mostly with Photoshop to give the appearance the object is floating off the page enough it is creating a shadow on the page. It’s a subtle technique that can have a dramatic impact on how people view and react to your site or blog.
This blog straddles the line between being too busy and engaging. The images are big and colorful but capture almost too much attention. What makes it easier to deal with is that the background image blends easily into the content area. This lends the background to feel more integrated into the overall blog.
This is a prime example of a blogging theme that has too much going on. It tries to incorporate all the various media that bloggers use, but to me, it feels like a mishmash of elements that takes away from the overall blog. I look at this blog theme and I wonder where the new posts go, or where is the archive?
If you want to conduct a survey of your blog readers but don’t have the time or programming knowledge to construct one, quibblo.com will construct one for you. They can create polls, quizzes and surveys for Blogger, WordPress and Xanga among others.
There’s many elements to a blog. There’s the layout, the design, the font color, style and size. Some companies will do one or the other, but there are companies that do it all. Squarespace is one of those companies, and from the looks of it, they handle some big name clients. If you have the money, these guys should be a decent option.
I love free, and I think it’s safe to say you do to. But when it comes to free, you get what you pay for. This particular blog theme feels too much like a cut and paste operation. The content has a clearly marked box and the background is a background. But that’s the problem. There is no connection from the background to the content, so it’s almost as if the background image could be changed to anything else and the theme would still work.
While most people seem to be moving to WordPress blogs, there are still many people out there using blogger to get their message out. And to service that particular demographic is a site called Blogger Themes. Blogger users will find designs with unique colors and designs for free on this site. This one in particular caught my attention. I like the dark background, the colored bubbles and the layout keeps the content from being lost.
That’s why I like my blog design.
This is going to be more advantageous for you if you are doing an online store, but if you want to have some fun with your blog, you can use this premium site design. You basically set up your site to look like a classified ads section of an online newspaper. I think it might be fun to have a site where each blog entry has a little classified ad look to it.
I decided to take a look at some free blog designs for WordPress and offer my opinion. The design in question comes from Bryan Veloso. First off, I like the darker background color. With so many pages having a light color, even offline programs like Microsoft Word, it’s nice to see something on the darker side. That being said, the greatest asset also is its greatest liability to me. With a monochrome color, there’s nothing to really demand your attention other than the hue. The layout is simple, which is a good thing. You can clearly see where the new content is and where the archives can be accessed. So, there is both positive and a little negative if you were to choose this particular theme.
