Personal Choices in Weblog Templates

How often do you change or cus­tomize your blog’s tem­plate (theme, your word of choice)? I find there is only so much I want to change through tweak­ing and the rest I hope to find in the tem­plate I pick. There are cer­tain things I always look for, mainly to do with read­abil­ity. I like a clean cut look with a font that looks pleas­ant and is easy to read. Many tem­plates seem to have tiny fonts lately. I don’t see how a site focused on being con­tent rich can pick a small font and think that is ok.

What do you look for in a blog template?

Here is my list, likely there are some things I will miss but it should give you an idea.

- Clear header, shows the site title and doesn’t blend in with the rest of the site.

- White space so the text doesn’t sink into the design.

- Dated entries. What is the point of mak­ing updates if no one can see your blog is being kept active.

-  One side­bar only. I tried 3 and even four but it just gets too clut­tered. You have to be bold and cut out some of that stuff you are keep­ing in side­bars. Move it or lose it.

- A footer that lets you stick some of the clut­ter away. But don’t use it as a catch all. Every­thing down there is pulling down the load time for your blog. Is it really worth keeping?

- Clear definin­ing points between posts. This includes hav­ing com­ments be easy to find wtih the blog entry they should be with. Some blogs require you to go back to the newest post to fig­ure out where one entry divides from another and which com­ment link is the one with the post you were reading.

- Sim­ple, clear font which looks pleas­ant on the page. I like a font with a lit­tle round­ness but not to the point of being bloated look­ing. That may only make sense to me.

- A lay­out I can eas­ily adapt by chang­ing back­grounds and other things with the bit of CSS I know or can look up in a book.

- Not a lot of colours. I think I out­grow those first. Black and white may be really tra­di­tional but when I see it on another blog I always like it. So I try to stick to that even though I really love colour, espe­cially red.

- I like being able to add links just under the header but it’s not essen­tial. An about sec­tion or a place to put a short descrip­tion under the title or near it. Peo­ple are get­ting blind to the con­tent in side­bars so your most essen­tial infor­ma­tion (what your blog is about) needs to be in a place where it is very visible.

- A bor­der of white­space around the blog itself. I like to have the option of adding a back­ground image to fancy it up for spe­cial occasions.

- Some­thing that doesn’t look really boxy. I know CSS works in sec­tions and mea­sure­ments but I pre­fer the tem­plate to look like it isn’t so regimental.

Tagged as: creative writing, web publishing, web writing