Blog Design 1 – Choosing a theme and colour scheme

In the first part of our blogging design series, we’re going to talk about choosing a theme, and colour scheme.

We’ve already chosen Thesis – because we’ve had our eye on it for a while.  This may also be the case with you – you may have spotted a theme that you quite like – or that you’d like to try with your next blog.
If not, you may find that you either have an idea of a theme layout, type or other concept.  Searching for examples of themes might give you inspiration, or you may find looking at featured blogs within your own niche helps.

If all else fails, you can google for themes, using a keyword such as ‘functional’, ‘beautiful’ or more to narrow down your concept.

An important aspect of designing for WordPress is ensuring you are satisfied with your theme choice.  We advise clients to ‘ignore’ colours – those in most cases can be changed, but look at the underlying structure and graphics.

Once you’ve chosen your theme, you should generate a colour scheme.  This process shouldn’t be rushed, but at the same time should take no longer than a couple of hours – start with the key colour you like, and generate options, at sites like Colour Scheme designer.  I like this one because it generates a basic, solid theme, simply by picking the colour you want – and can go into more depth, simply by choosing a different dial along the top of the main selector, changing the angle, contrast and more within the site.  And it exports the results to html, photoshop, gimp, which is an amazing, extra tool that makes a lot of difference.  You can import swatches by following the information provided with your program.

Remember to save your final colour scheme URL provided once it’s all generated – that URL will store your choices without needing to duplicate anything.

Our next post will talk about building the basics of your theme around your content – whether this is a redesign of an existing blog, or to start out.

Designing a new blog – the process

In another set of ongoing article serieses, I’m going to examine how I design and set up the WPWonderwoman Blog.

The WordPress Wonderwoman is an older project that was originally a sales site for design and portfolio work with WordPress, blog coaching (which has split to here) and consultation/emergency support.

In association with TheBloggingCoach and HostingForwriters, the WPwonderwoman is going to be a portfolio, in depth tech information and discussion on themes, plugins, and more, plus a portfolio display area.
WordPressWonderwoman will also be the tech support contact for all of my blogging offerings.

So, in the next few days and weeks, I’ll share the design process, and the order I completed the work in, so you can work through it.  And at the end, I’ll offer a cheatsheet and it will become the foundation for our work in designing blogs.

First choice we’ve made, which is where the design process starts, is our theme. I’ve been working with clients that enjoy Thesis, an amazingly optimised, solid theme that allows you to customise everything in broad strokes, or down to tiny ‘minor’ things.  More importantly, it keeps your customisations seperate, allowing you to upgrade the components running the blog without losing your customisations.