Archive for the 'Design' Category

How to Save Your Blog From a Cheesy Look - Using Colour Palettes

Monday, October 29th, 2007

In one of my latest posts I tried to explain how to change a free wordpress theme in to your personalized wordpress design. Actually it is nothing more than changing the background colors of the images used in your theme but there is more than that. You try to play around with colors for your theme and your blog still looks cheesy. (You can check my blog’s previous designs from evolution page). That’s because you don’t have an artist’s eye (It is something however, there are many bloggers who can’t even understand their blog looks cheesy). You have to look for more if you want to give your blog a professional design. You have to know how the colors interact with each other and how they will look as parts of a whole piece. Don’t Panic! There is an easy way to do that also.

If you don’t have an artist’s eye, you have to seek for an artist willing to share his/her perspective with you. Thanks to internet we can easily find many artists willing to share their highly artistic and poetic perspectives :) If you are looking for nice colors to get along with each other and make your blog look good than you need a colour palette. Through long searches I found colourlovers the most professional and poetic one. The colourlovers term actually stand for them because these guys are real colour fetishes. They go with the tag “Fight for love in the colour revolution.” They have many palettes and a special page for website colour trends.

So.. I was going to try to write a poem about the sadness and anguish people must go through when they see their husbands, wives, fathers, mothers and loved one being deployed to war but..I choosed a palette named “We Got the Call..” which is highly poetic. The artist defines to describe the colors with the words: “So.. I was going to try to write a poem about the sadness and anguish people must go through when they see their husbands, wives, fathers, mothers and loved one being deployed to war but..” Whatever, enough of melancholia, I loved the colors and decided to use them with my blog. The palette is given with the hexadecimal colour codes for each color and you can try each color as background, title, links colours. First Start with the best background colour for your sidebar, and header then decide what colors to use as titles, sidebar text colors and etc..

After defining the colour scheme for the blog I tried to work for a banner to go with those colours and designed this banner which is done with some easy tricks with Photoshop. When you are done with setting up colours and banner don’t forget to generate a new adsense code to collobrate with your new colors. I started seeing effects of new design immediately as income.

Designing your blog

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007

Default wordpress theme is eye candy and you may be loving it but you need to personalize your blog’s look. Even if the last design you made with your computer was painting a house and a tree with paintbrush at the age of six, don’t panic! Wordpress has a huge source of free themes in the internet. If you make a few Google searches you can find many free themes for your blog. (I will make a list of good free themes later) First let’s get an opinion about basic structure of wordpress themes.

The classic wordpress theme consists of a header; 2 columns (main index page and sidebar) and a footer. Before searching for themes make clear what you want. Do you like a blog with 3 columns or 2 columns, do you want the sidebar on the right or left. If you don’t want to get lost inside themes design your blog layout on paper and choose from themes which fits your blog best.

Personalize your theme: If you found the theme matching for your layout design but the images are about the life of cows. Still don’t panic! You can personalize your theme independent of the original design. When you download the theme you can see the images folder under your theme files. In the images folder you can find the images you can edit to change the themes background, header image and etc.. I have liked a theme about real estate and changed the image files to match my subject. See the difference =>

Before the Changes

Before the Changes

 After the Changes

After the Changes

Don’t forget to change the background color on all images . When you finish the changes upload the theme folder to themes directory under wordpress content and select the theme from admin panel. (Important: You have to implement the adsense code again after adding a new theme)