Website and Blog Design | Blogging | Writing Forum

Today let's talk about Web design -- more specifically how you design your own professional sites and / or blogs. 

There are a lot of options available to you. For example, you have free themes, premium templates, designers for hire, or you can design them yourself. 

I use a mix of those things. For more personal blogs, I just toss up a free template. For most blogs I use premium themes as a base and then customize them to my heart's content (which is what I did on this site). I've hired designers to do custom work for me in the past. And I've designed a few sites from scratch on my own. Generally I prefer the "premium theme + customization" method to move things along. 

The one thing I'm not a big fan of, specifically for Wordpress, is theme frameworks. I find that they often complicate the process more than simplifying it (although they'd be great for someone who doesn't know how to edit the template files and stylesheet directly). But I broke down this week and got a dev license for Thesis because I need to quickly build several new sites and blogs. So far it's anything but quick to customize, but my hope is that after the first one that will get easier. 

What about you? How do you prefer to set up the design for a new website or blog? Do you wish you had handled your site's design differently? If you were to launch a new site tomorrow, how would you go about designing it?

Jenn

It has a simple clean look. But you can always inject more personality through basic formatting and your copy. It definitely looks fresher than the previous design.

Oh, don't put yourself down. A step up is a step up. Besides. All that matters is that it dazzles the clients; not our design sense.