Darren of Problogger just posted an entry of How to Create a Blog Theme from Scratch so I thought why not take this small opportunity in sharing my process.
To be honest upfront, I just migrated over to WordPress. But since I’ve been designing some blogs for friends and for a Motorola client before, I thought why not discuss some of the basics in creating a blog theme. Whether or not it uses MovableType, WordPress or any other publishing engine.
Probably the first step of customizing a blog theme to your requirements or wants is to decide if you’re going to be creating it for your own viewing, accordance to your blog niche or your audience? Then you’d need to decide if the blog theme is going to be shared with the public for general use on the other hand to keep this entry short and concise we’re going to assume you’re only creating a theme for yourself.
Now let’s go through each of the 3 options you had and its weaknesses. Creating a blog theme for your own viewing speaks for itself. You’re only creating it for your own self-satisfaction in terms or usability, readability and function.
If you were to design for your niche, then you’d need to add branding to the list of usability, readability and function. Creating a blog theme to your niche would be more concentrated on marketing your brand and name of what your blog is about.
Designing for your audience is a very tricky situation because you can’t design to accomodate each individuals likes and dislikes. However, a planned niche blog should already have an idea and description of the type of audience they’re planning to pull in.
With these 3 options, they’d automatically categorized the type of blog you’re planning to start which is a journal/diary, company/marketing/branding or community.
The next thing is deciding on a layout and the layout could relate to the 3 options. Due to the choices you’d be able to find online, we’ll just consider a basic header, 1/2/3/4 column content and a footer type layout.
I’m going to skip the appropriate layout for the first option because as mentioned, designing for yourself isn’t for anyone else.
For the second option I feel a 2 column content would be the best but with a new blogging trend of using the header or footer to its full potential, I’ve noticed bloggers breaking them into 3 columns for additional content. It’s good as long you don’t get too carried away by placing too much additional content there.
The community project is the one with normally the most columns and starts with a minimum of 3 columns. Mainly because there’s normally a lot of authors, updated content and not to mention accomodation for ads. The biggest challenge of community themes are to have something easy looking, simple to use and fundamentally functional to all of its users.
Once you’ve decided on a layout and the most efficient number of columns for you, it’s time to grab a pencil and paper. Start sketching possibilities of your layout arrangement in boxes.
The next step which I do is start visualizing the placement of my content. For instance, where does my short biodata go? where should I put the recent posts? where should I place the ads?
This is to help you think about the possibilities and scenarios that might occur when your audience visits your blog. It also beats unnecessary headache of shifting things around too much on the computer.
Now that you’ve got your idea on paper, you start creating that simple layout in Adobe Photoshop or some would prefer putting it into code right away. With the blank canvas (I use 760 pixels Width and 480 pixels Height), you start creating your boxes with just a border and no fill like what you did on the paper.
Once the boxes are up, you add in some of your copy and images that you might use. Now you’re viewing a mockup of your soon-to-be created weblog. If you think something won’t work, shift it around without disturbing the layout or you’re pushing yourself back to the drawing board.
If you know of friends whom are free, maybe you could just have them take a look at the layout and ask them what they think and feel.
Once the tweaking of content is done, you now need either code it yourself or get some help. And though it might be late to mention this, it’s best if you either hire, ask or bribe a friend or designer to help you with the look and feel.
I’m not suggesting for the sake of being hired but if you’ve read How To Choose a Website Designer, you’ll find out why Yaro Starak decided to have a designer help him out with the overall look and feel.
This is a pretty long entry to be the basics but trust me if I were to really write it out, this could be made into a series of its own. ;)
And I am interested! :P