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Posts tagged with: Design
Check What is Above The Fold with Google Browser Size Tool
Want to know what percentage of your users see that “buy now” or subscribe button? If you’re selling something, you should be interested in that. If you sell or buy advertising on a blog, you’d want the advertising to be seen by majority of the visitors too.
Whatever the most important element on your page is, you want to make sure it is above the fold, which means what the user sees when they first enter the page. So no scrolling or anything.
Because many users leave if they don’t see anything interesting, check that your call to action or something eye-catching is in that first view. And with that, Google’s new browser size tool will help you.
Create Free Images For Your Blog With Wordle
Images are great way to spice up your blog posts, eBooks and other websites. Using attention capturing image on a blog post can greatly increase the chances of your visitors to check out that post. The usual options to get images, like stock photos or shared images from services like Flickr are great, but occasionally you might want something different.
Let me introduce you to Wordle.
Wordle is a tool that you can use to create “word clouds” from text that you provide, either by typing or copy-pasting text to the tool or inserting an URL address. You can use Wordle to create UNIQUE images for your blog, blog posts, eBooks or even T-Shirts.
My Blog Design And WordPress Theme
As I wrote back in early August, I entered The Best WordPress Design of 2009 contest and I re-designed this blog during those days just in time when the contest opened.
The contest has been open for voting a couple of weeks now and over 500 votes have been recorded already.
Many blogs on the contest are modified versions of premium or free themes, which is great way to get a theme looking like you want without going through the trouble of designing a whole theme.
Crazy me decided that it would be cool to create my own theme and design it from the scratch, so that’s exactly what I did, so the blog design is my own and I built the WordPress Theme from the ground up.
With that, now it’s a good time to go back to the design process and tell you a bit why the blog looks like it looks…
You Don’t Have To Be a Web Designer to Build a Website
Do you know that a blog can be just like any other website?
And do you know that you can create “normal” website with WordPress instead of “just blogs”?
Yeah, there’s a lot to blogs and blogging that doesn’t meet the eye and there’s a whole lot more to WordPress than just blogging and blogs, just like there are incredible misconceptions around about blogs and what they are about..
Warning: If You Still Build Your Webpages With FrontPage, You Are Doing It Wrong!
What is a website? webpage? How would you create one? If you think FrontPage, DreamWeaver, or some other WYSIWYG HTML editors, I’m betting you are not alone.
In the last century people got educated that everyone should build a “homepage” and that instead of “coding” the page with HTML, it’s easy to do with this cool editor called FrontPage.
And then came “blogging” or “webblogs” and new tools for that, and now we had blogs and webpages. Dare I say, CONFUSING! And to this day, pretty much every blogger out there (me included) have contributed to this confusion by keeping up an illusion that blog is a blog and not a website.
All this has contributed to the fact that there are a LOT OF PEOPLE out there who think that the only way to build a website is static HTML and that a blog is somehow separated from all that. So I’ll share this with you right now that you can share with your friends..
My New Design Enters the Best WordPress Design 2009 Contest!
As I posted yesterday, my new WordPress theme is now activated and the new design is live! And what’s a better way to test the waters of the new design than to submit my blog to a design competition!
FresheVenture.com, an online entrepreneur blog by the lovely Keller Hawthorne, is hosting a WordPress Design 2009 Contest with excellent pricesĀ from both the sponsors and Keller herself.
Best WordPress Design 2009 Contest
The Best WordPress Design 2009 Contest is open for anyone with a WordPress blog, personal or tweaked theme and great way to promote your blog whether your brand new blogger or a seasoned veteran.
The best WordPress Design 2009 contest is for:
- Bloggers
- WordPress Powered Blogs
- Both original themes and customized free or premium WP themes
You can even nominate your favorite (WordPress) blog and design, if you don’t have a blog of your own!
The prices include such gems as
- Become a Blogger Premium membership,
- StudioPress All-Themes Package,
- OIOpublisher WordPress Ad Manager Plugin,
- free review from Fresheventure.com and not the least,
- free exposure for everyone entering, not just the winners..
For me, just entering the competition is a price in itself, getting the blog name out there in the blogosphere, so in a sense I’ve already won :)
Best WordPress Design 2009 Contest Timeline
- August 1, 2009 to August 31, 2009: Submissions/Nominations Accepted
- September 1, 2009 to October 2, 2009: Voting Open
- October 6, 2009: Winner and Finalists Announced!
Submit Your Own Blog and Design!
In case you have a customized free or premium WP theme, your own design, I suggest that you Enter the Best WordPress Design 2009 Contest too! If that’s not your thing, stay tuned and give your support to my blog design instead..
You can find all the details from the FresheVenture.com blog here: Official Best WordPress Design 2009 Contest Guidelines
Support Me & Zemalf.com
The submissions for the competition will last for this month, contest is open from August 1, 2009 to August 31, 2009 . When the submissions close, the voting begins which lasts for the September, and at the beginning of October we’ll have the official results.
To be honest, I’m not entering the competition to win it, but for fun as I’ve never done anything like this. And it’s a great chance to test the waters of my new design and get feedback what is working and what is not.
The voting begins on 1st of September 2009, but if you’re itching to praise or flame me, you can do it right here, so speak your mind and leave a comment!
Zemalf.com Gets New WP Theme and Design
My Shiny New Theme Design is Live!
I’m trying new things, I’ve been working on my blog design on a local-hosted WordPress for quite some time. It’s been an interesting experiment and getting all things just right hasn’t been an easy task. I wouldn’t recommend wasting time on theme design unless that is exactly what you want to do and/or learn – what was the case for me. But anyway, not it’s done and the new design is live for everyone to see..
Designing a WordPress Theme
Starting to build your own theme or design by yourself can eat days, weeks even. And professional designer gets the theme done a lot faster and ready-made theme gets the job done in anything between 15 minutes and couple of hours. However, I wanted my own design and I’m quite happy with it. It has some elements that not too many bloggers use and on the other hand, lot of familiar elements from many other blog designs and themes, including my old design.
By designing my own theme I know EXACTLY what’s in it, and what’s not in it (so I can add elements if needed). And by creating the theme myself I got it done exactly like I wanted – yes it took some time, but still, I didn’t have to negotiate and swing drafts and versions back and forth with anyone else. One of the design choices I made was limiting colors, going with gray color scale..
Limiting Colors – Focusing Attention
I chose a gray theme on purpose. It enables effective use of colors to highlight things I want to highlight. So instead of the blog jumping on new readers face in all colors of the rainbow, I wanted to present a minimalistic, easy to read, design – with emphasis on typography, gray color scale (apart from highlighting) and some graphical elements.
My older theme was Sandbox variant with my own CSS, but now I built the whole theme from ground up, firstly for interest, secondly because I wanted to learn and thirdly to get it “just right” for me without the generic parts that many themes have (because a public theme has to work on any WordPress blog). The whole theme is pure CSS at the moment, as the whole theme is grid-based and the actual design and layout comes from CSS which I can easily change.
This design is a work in progress, even thou it’s operational, so I’m looking to tweak the theme as needed to make it just right for me..
Feedback Time!
Tell me what you think, I’d really love to hear what you think about the new design?
And be honest here, I can take it :)
What you like, what you don’t like about the design?


