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]

In these 30 themes, 15 are for KDE and 15 for Gnome. As a gnome user, I will list only those I really liked a lot. There are only 5 themes that really hit me when I saw them !

Magic Book

Somatic

Wooden

Sunset

Leaf

But when it comes to marketing and design it’s always usefull to have the expert point of view from a book.

Today while searching for a good book on MVC principles, I realised that I finally need more information on marketing and design than on technical stuff. Last time I bought a technical book, I read the first two chapters and then learned everything by myself…

So I deicded to change my search and found this amazing book.

I will probably make some posts on marketing and design in the next few weeks as to me, this is obvious that even the most beautifull code is nothing if you don’t do marketing on it (see the dotclear example, this cms engine is probably the most beautifully written app I’ve ever seen, but marketing is not the goal of the team, so it’s not well known)

This new design doesn’t only include a new layout, but also this brand new logo, a favicon and a real good looking design.

Why did I say something big ? Simply because I didn’t like previous one, in fact I realised that if I had to fall on a blog like the one I had before, i wasn’t sure I would have subscribed as it was nice to look at but hard to read.

My inspiration

First I would like to say that this new design is inspired from one of the most beautifull webdesign to me and also a great source for designers. To me this is a not a copy or a rip, it’s more something like a tribute to SmashingMagazine.

I was also inspired by the wordpress theme Coda, that uses a lot Mootools for effects, such as the one you can see on the right top sidebar.

And finally, I use Oxygen icons for most images you’ll find here. Simply because these are probably the most beautifull icons available for an Operating System environment.

The about section is inspired by what we can see on ProBlogger and introductory text was corrected by my lovely wife.

Final words

I just hope you will enjoy this design as much as I do, and do not hesitate to leave comments about what you think of my new design.

[Photo credits: Strawbleu]

Image © John-Morgan

Today, after reading this interresting post at Smashing magazine (which by the way is a great source of inspiration to me), I decided to give my sidebar a little bit more space.

And this is not the only modification I made, I also removed the Per hour theme, because it didn’t look equally conceived. So for now, there will only be one state, white background.

This theme, like Stars and Grass is completly french/english bilingual as Abc-Cooking is a french blog opening an english version soon.

You can see the new theme in action on Abc-Cooking.

Of course, this theme is not available for download as it was made only for Abc-Cooking, but you may ask the owner for permission to have it.

Je dirais donc que si vous faites de la photo, c’est LE livre à posséder.

D’ou la création du site SaveTheDevelopers.org qui permet aux createurs de site de mettre une petite baniere en javascript renvoyant leurs utilisateurs vers le-dit site afin qu’ils puissent prendre connaissance des avantages de passer à un navigateur plus récent.

GotoCSS3, un site au design vraiment très bien fait et qui m’inspire fortement, un site prometteur quoi qu’il en soit puisqu’il va traiter des CSS3!

kulturbanause est un blog au design quoi que particulier, très bien réalisé et que j’aprécie dans le travail fait pour l’integration du fond dans la continuité du design.

Et enfin Fubiz, un blog que je suis depuis longtemps, mais dont je n’avais pas parlé particulierement et qui pourtant a un design très soigné, heureusement, vu que le sujet du blog est le design!