New Blog Design Received with Thumbs Up

Many of my regular readers would have noticed that I changed my blog design only a few days ago. What differs is mainly the width of the whole site and that I have incorporated two sidebars. Plus obviously the radical new look. The reason I decided to write this post is because I have noticed quite a few clicks on the footer looking to see where the theme is from. Judging by that, there must be some interest by others which means they what they see. So without further ado, here is the story of my new Blog Design:

1. I wanted a Web 2.0 look that allows me to incorporate things as the blog grows such as advertising from others
2. Despite the fact that I quite liked the older design I felt it was time for a radical change which resulted in this blog
3. I totally removed all advertising except my own. You might have seen my Skype Widget where I offer my blog consultation services. I figure since I have so much knowledge about blogs in general, why not help others who are really stuck and make this a sideline of my business? To be honest I have no idea, whether this might be utilized, but you can’t blame a girl for trying.
4. I also wanted a featured section where I can place links to other sites that I think are worthwhile to visit. May it be a particular post that sparked my attention, a competition to participate in or occasionally a product I endorse and deem worthy to share with you.
5. My own picture and a brand new header image are still coming. I’m playing with ideas as I write this and am not 100% on where to place my image at this stage. I’m toying with the top right hand sidebar. What do you think?

The way it came about is a rather long and boring story. But for those who do enjoy the old “yawn” here it is: It first started about 3 month ago when I saw one of the bigger blogs update their theme. This animated me to think “why not me”? After all, if I want to stay in the blogging game I had to adopt to trends, so the idea of updating my theme was born then.

I spent the next 2 month or so hunting for the perfect design. At that stage I really had no idea yet of exactly what I wanted. By browsing 100s of themes I gradually made up my mind on what I didn’t want. So I guess this helped me to narrow down the possibilities. I mainly browsed free theme sites and below are a few I frequented over and over again.

http://www.wpthemesfree.com/

http://www.siteground.com/wordpress-hosting/wordpress-themes.htm

http://themes.wordpress.net/

http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress/theme_browser.php

But despite me looking every day and studying designs of the big bloggers who also happened to upgrade I learned two things.

First – I was on the right track as most of the big bloggers started doing exactly the same. Kind of like spring in the Blog World.

Second – I realized that no matter how hard I looked I knew I had to pay for a theme that suited my slowly manifesting thoughts as I just couldn’t find a free theme that had everything I wanted.

So off I went to get some quotes from professional blogging design companies and or individuals. What I learnt was that I couldn’t afford their asking price at this time in my life. But then I had the ingenious (to me it was anyway) idea to combine two designs I had previously seen as both contained some things that I wanted for my blogs.

All I had to do is figure out on how to do this. Believe me when I say “I tried” to do it myself. But I’m not a CSS geek and that was my first downfall. The second would have been php I guess. (Even though I do manage to tamper with the back office from time to time I have no idea on how to write php from scratch.

Outsourcing the job was the next step and that’s exactly what I did. I outsourced my design and then separately from that I again outsourced my header logo. I told my blog designer exactly what I had in mind and he went and did it. I truly believe that the two guys who did this did a tremendous job and the resulting theme looks schmiko to me. Sorry, I got carried away then by pure pride and happiness. Schmiko relates to really cool or great from Australian slang.

What I have learned from this is: Never be afraid to come up with something new if you feel it is the right thing at the time and if you don’t know how to do it, then outsource the job. I used Digital Point for this and it worked well.

Thanks for reading this and do let me know what you think about my new blog design, if you haven’t already done so.

Monika