This post is the first of a series of posts called Extreme Makeover: WordPress Edition

1 – List the good/bad things about your design

Before to go to far, you should make a list of all the features you want and all you want to get rid of from your current design.

Which basically means, what do you want to keep from your current design and what do you dislike ?

For example, you might want to get rid of that left sidebar and move it to the right, get a better search system but want to keep your great Archives page !

2 – Define your style.

You have to define your topic. Then you’ll have to decide which style you will use.
Why is that ? Mostly because your topic and your style will have a bigger impact with a design made for them.

Let’s say for example you are a Video game company and you want to have a funny design, then you cannot have a serious style as it will be misplaced. If you have a comic style logo and have a corporate tone, then your audience will be lost.

An the contrary, if you have a profesionnal looking website like the one we can see at EA, then your tone as to be corporate.

3 – Define your content guidelines

How do you intend to present your content, one image as a header, 2 paragraphs as the introduction and h2 titles to cut the content ?

This content guidelines will help you to define the whole structure of the site (cf ch4). If you use a banner for all posts, then you have to define the placeholder with the correct sizing to make sure there is consistency on all pages of your design.

As well, if you do use separators for paragraphs, you’ll have to remember to design them.

4 – Define the general structure

You have to know how the content is going to be organized, this means define (or change) the names of your categories, the pages and how they will be organized, like subpages etc…

By doing that, you will give more consistency to your blog as well as readability. For example, you can see that I do have a header with pages, this will change in next design as there will be more sub-pages and therefore more submenus. I will also join multiple pages into one page with subpages.

About + Resume + Contact will become an entire category (page + subpages) and will lighten the header.

[Photo Credit: Caro Wallis]