Three weeks into blogging, I’ve found myself unhappy with the design of ZsoltBalla.com, and although I still like the look of the Redoable Wordpress theme. Even though I still dig the basic elements of the theme, I’ve already made a couple of modifications, and given certain difficulties I had to face when trying to modify it further and further, I’m not sure if I will stay with Redoable on the long run. Anyway, I’m sure I will change it to something else only if I completely run out of workarounds and alternative ways. But before that, here are the few modifications I made to make the site look better (I’m still not 100% happy with the result though, but I think I still have plenty of time to experiment).
- I got rid of the black background. (I don’t know why, but people apparently don’t like it)
Despite the fact that I still like white text on black background (what used to be the appearance of ZsoltBalla.com in its first three weeks of operation), I haven’t come across any other blog that I’d like to read, and that is using this “negative” color combination. It may be because people claim that their eyes hate it: I know that my eyes don’t. So even if I don’t know the reason, there has to be one, because of the zillion blogs I recently checked not one has been using white text on black background. (If you have any idea why this is, pleas leave me a comment, because I’m really interested.)
I’m still not happy with the (minimalist) color scheme, though. I want, for example, links and bold texts to stand out more due to their colors, etc.
- I’ve changed the font face of my titles.
Sans-serif fonts have lost their appeal a couple of years ago, even if we’re talking about web design. So I changed my post titles (similarly to the blog title) to font-family:Georgia,serif; a simple, yet nice font. I’ve also slightly increased the font size of the post titles.
- I got rid of all the lowercases
Using texts (titles, brand names etc) all lowercase was really cool, say, six years ago. Now it feels so 2002 (if you don’t trust me, read what
Under Consideration has to say on all lowercase). It turned out that the lowercasing of all my titles were done by the css (I didn’t even know that CSS was capable of doing that, but while searching I’ve found
other cool css text effects, too). So I’ve gone through my style.css files, and deleted all those
text-transform: lowercase; lines. Man, there were many of them. I think the site looks way better now.
- I got rid of AdSense (for now)
Things are not going quite as well as I hoped they would, so I decided to remove the AdSense strips from my blog for now (I’ll post on my expectations vs. reality in more details in the very near future, possibly tomorrow). What all this boils down to at the moment is that, while it’s clear that it won’t make me substantial money, I don’t want my visitors to be distracted by them. I always frown at sites that are clearly in their initial phase of developments, both from traffic and from content point of view, and still, they are packed with advertisements. Since I don’t want to be frowned at, I decided to focus on content and traffic for now, and money, I know, will follow.
- I wrote an about page, and got rid of the default Wordpress links in my blogroll
It didn’t happen today, but still the delayed was way too long. Fortunately it is done now.
That was it for now. If you have any other idea, what I should change in the look of my blog (without diving deep into developing a custom Wordpress theme), I’d appreciate if you let me know in the comments section. Thank you.
hi zsolt, thank for commenting on my blog. i visited your blog yesterday however something happened, i had to go offline, i was not able to leave a comment on your blog.
Nice blog you have here, with good content. unsolicited comment —> yes, i agree with you, white background is more ok than the black one you had yesterday.
i too am experimenting with my layout, did a lot of template changes, did lots of adsense experimentation here and there.
thanks for the comment,
Hope you had a good Christmas.
Generally, I like the changes you’ve made, here are a couple of things I noticed:
1. You still have AdSense in the sidebar – it’s a black vertical ad. Is this intentional? I thought you should know about it seeing as you said you removed all the AdSense.
2. I’m not too keen on the greeny blue colour in the header – it’s a bit dark. Perhaps if you lighten it slightly, it would look a bit better.
3. When viewing a post, you have a second sidebar with post info and a bookmark button – then there’s a huge gap. You don’t have a lot of stuff on your site yet, but I can’t help wondering if this empty sidebar could be put to good use.
Hope this helps!