The book I read to research this post was Blog Design For Dummies by Melissa Culbertson which is an excellent book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com
Steve Jobs the former boss at Apple once said that good design isn’t just about how something looks, it’s also about how something works. If you think about something like the iphone or ipod you will see what he means. It’s the same with a blog and I know a lot of my blogs have a basic design which is why I thought I’d read this. Many web designers use heat maps to help decide where everything goes on a web page. We know the average person decides within 3 seconds whether they like a website or blog. In the western world they tend to look to the left which is probably because we read from the left to the right. Therefore information like an about page secition, some featured posts, and maybe author information will tend to be on the left. A heat map is a map of where a person tends to look in the first few seconds of arriving on a page. The page has to be easy to navigate and if it is a business should have information like business address and prices displayed prominently. The colours on the site should be coordinated. There’s a website called Kuler owned by Adobe that has swatches that can be imported into programs like illustrator and photoshop that help with this colour coordination. Another thing particularly with blogs is themes and if you have a wordpress blog a free one they recommend is thesis which I am considering having for my blogs on that site. There are also widgets although you do find many of these are for the self hosted version. There is also the issue of importing fonts and if you go http://typekit.com which is also owned by Adobe you can get fancy websafe fonts. Another issue is photos for which they recommend a free program called picmonkey among others. There is also dabbling in CSS & HTML which if you use WordPress you must purchase the extended version to do. There is also a lot in this book on Blogger & Tumblr which are also very popular. It’s a really good book I enjoyed reading & I learned a lot from it.
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