Themes
Saturday, April 7th, 2007
Is everyone talking about themes? I guess it's probably because my awareness has been raised as I am in the middle of changing my own theme, but as of late it appears as though every other post I read is looking at the subject.
A couple of weeks ago there was a discussion over at
Weblog Tools Collection looking at whether two or three column's was best. Mark had this to say:
I personally prefer one column themes with a minimal second column. Most information that is put on my sidebar(s) is extraneous and could be placed elsewhere. I have also found that some of that information deters from the original content of the blog. The landing page concept is nice for search engine traffic where extra links and information on the content might help you draw in the user to explore some more. However, the face of the blog is cleaner and chock full of good stuff to read with lesser distractions.
It's well worth clicking through to see the various comments, plenty of food for thought there.
This weekend
Lorelle On WordPress has also raised the issue. Her viewpoint?
I believe that above everything else, your blog must “look†like what you want it to look like. It must reflect who you are and what you blog about. The choice of how many sidebars the blog requires must service those points.
I agree with most of the commenter's over there, it's not how many columns but how you use them.
Overall I think that more than three columns can be a bit overwhelming, but all in all it is not how many columns you have, but making good use of them. Provide good content in your main column and make it easy for your readers to navigate your site with the side columns, keep them as uncluttered as possible.
Obviously advertisements are the things that ruin most sites looks, this is where real care needs to be taken. So far I have not tried to monetize this site in any real way, a couple of affiliate links in posts but I have kept my sidebars clear. The sites that make real money out of blogging are the ones that manage to keep their blogs from becoming to cluttered, allowing their revenue sources to stand out without being too obtrusive, a neat trick but not easy to pull off. I guess this is why a lot of them have custom made themes. Which leads to the next point.
Being discussed over at
Pro Blogger is the subject of free themes versus custom made. Guest blogger
Mathew Coddington from Net Business Blog had this to say:
At one point in every blogger’s career he or she has to make a choice between investing in a custom template or staying the course with a premade, downloadable template. There are important factors that you have to keep in mind with each ranging anywhere from funds to brandibility.
Most commenter's seem to feel that the middle road is the best way to go, customize a theme you already like, which is the way I usually go. It doesn't take too much skill or time to turn a free download theme into something that no one else on the interweb has.
And as a final point on the subject, more and more of the free WordPress themes you see on the
WordPress Theme Viewer seem to be sponsored, and there were two posts about this that caught my interest.
The Blog Herald looks at the pro's of sponsored themes:
I know several designers who give away WordPress themes to blog hosting services for free, so long as they get a link back to their sites. Now this seems to be a great business model for people who want to monetize their theme creations. Not all bloggers can afford to pay for your themes. But there are companies and businesses that would be willing to foot the bill. In the end, everyone’s happy: users get great themes, designers get good money, companies get inbound links.
But there has been some negative thoughts about it too, as expressed by Small Potato over at
WP Designer.com:
sponsored-theme designers are pushing it. Let me remind you I don’t have a problem with sponsored theme designers and the practice of theme sponsorship, as long as the designers make it clear to the users of what they’re downloading. However, sponsored theme designers are really pushing it. Some are blatantly spamming the theme viewer.
Plenty of food for thought on both sides, but once again it seems to be not whatis being done but the way it is done.
Anyway, enough from me, what are your thoughts? How many columns do you prefer? Would you pay for a customized theme? How do you feel about the sponsored themes that seem to be more and more prevalent? Let me know in your comments.
Sunday, April 1st, 2007
So March has blown by, I cant say as my challenge for last month of a comment a day went totally according to plan, but I did post more comments than I otherwise would of done so that's not so bad. :wink:
For April I have set myself the challenge of getting this blogs look more finalized, if you have visited before you will notice that I have changed themes again, this theme is based on the
RockinSuckerfish by
Nathan Rice of
RockinThemes.com, but I have adapted it fairly extensively with my own preferred colours.
I have also added "
Sweet Titles" and I have moved around the RSS and changed the date/authors name layout.
That was all in the CSS, I have also added a couple of extra plugins such as "smileys" for the comments and a tag cloud of my categories for my sidebar. Also as a final touch (for now) I moved
Robs Translator from my Sandbox site to here, you can see it at the very top of the page on the left hand side.
I hope you like the new look, please let me know what you think in the comments, also if you notice any problems that I may have overlooked. Thanks. :grin:
Wednesday, January 10th, 2007
If any of you are returning to this site you may notice that once again I have changed themes, not that I didn't love using
dark.cash but I felt happier with a right sidebar and I quite fancied a three column theme as well.
I have settled on
Zen for now, partly because I love the idea of the distinctive middle column. I feel that one of the disadvantages of a three column theme is that the eye can easily become confused unless everything is clearly delineated, and the layout of Zen avoids this nicely. Plus it's mighty pretty.
It comes pre-packed with
sweetTitles and
iBox, two very nice plugins. I have had a few problems getting iBox to work properly, I think that there is probably a better way to implement it than the way I have at the moment but I will have to mess around with it some more. You can see the way iBox works with the image in my previous post:
"Thank Fleck For That".
Monday, December 18th, 2006
Eventually I will settle down to a definite theme, sorry if I am confusing anyone who has tried to keep checking back to my blog!
The one you see before you at this moment is
dark.cash and I think it is one I may stick with, though that may well be determined by the final version of this theme as the current one is only version 0.8.
I enjoyed using "
Black White and Red":
This also had the benefit of being a big favourite with the Mrs, who always has a better sense of style and colour than I do, so I would thoroughly recommend this to anyone who is looking for a bit of a change.
I also enjoyed using the theme "
vistered-little-1.6":
which is a highly customizable theme that allows you to drop in your own background as well as having some pretty good default wallpaper of its own. Your visitors can choose which view they would like to have for themselves! You can also choose whether to have a left or right hand sidebar, which I think is pretty neat.
Monday, December 4th, 2006
Well, at the end of last week I changed my theme to one that allows for widgets, I was quite pleased with this one but I have modified the top bar slightly.
I liked the
Black White and Red theme as it suited my (bad) sense of humour, as in "What is Black White and Red/Read all over?", it also goes quite well with the
"Firefox 2" theme that I am using at ther moment, "
rubyFox", but I wanted alittle more red at the top than was provided.
Looks Shiny to me!
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