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When Is It Time To Change Blog Themes?

Recently, when I realised that I had passed my first birthday as a Blogtrepreneur, I decided it was time for a change. I had got all too used and tired with standardised blog themes and wanted to stand out, to be different, and to put myself in a different light by getting a new theme that would depict my entrepreneurial flare.

The hiring of the designer was easy – and in fact I’ll be making a whole post on the design part of the blog and the designer himself (for the time being, he goes by the name Connor and you can check out his blog here).

Instead, in this post I want to focus on the reasons for changing blog themes and when the time is right to swap your industry standard layout for a brand spanking new one. I decided it was time to change blog themes when…:

  • My old theme started taking ages to load up after bogging it down with too many features, with too many plugins and with too many widgets (I blame MyBlogLog!)
  • I logged onto the site to be greeted by a disaster scene where text and images had been flung all over the place, and the site lacked real direction.
  • My writing was affected due to the lack of thrust and flare I had for my blog design
  • I had problems trying to position pictures into a post due to some dodgy coding
  • You go onto other blogs and realise that your site is missing some important features.
  • You’re just downright bored and want a change in your life (this feeling here is probably caused by personal feelings and has nothing to do with blogging or the internet!)

Making a blog theme appealing to visitors can be quite a task as I’ve found out. There are certain elements which you need to include, especially in the header – things like logo, search bar, advertising and deep linking all need to be done significantly but not in moderation. Balance is the key and I think I’ve cracked the design after a few days working with the programmer.

The sidebar has also caused quite a lot of thinking to occur. The main reason is that a lot of space is needed for the different elements associated with a sidebar – archives, categories, ads, polls, interactivity, etc. However, we came up with an ingenious idea to solve this – the use of AJAX! Yes, in the redesign, all you interactive lovers will see slidy sidebars! I won’t expand into too much detail but you can see what I mean hopefully – so be excited.

OK, well I don’t want to spoil any more aspects of the design, but Im just building the tension so I can have an awesome relaunch of Blogtrepreneur. Tell your friends/family/dog/cat!

P.S. As there’s still time for change, are there any features/design elements that you would like to see in the redesign? Feel free to comment or shoot me a detailed email!

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