Time for a new Poll.
Who designed your blog?
I’m sure there will be other options to those that I included. If you don’t feel your situation is covered feel free to leave a comment below and tell us your answer.
{democracy:28}
I’d also be interested to hear about your decision to design your blog the way you did. Why did you choose the option and template that you did?
I got an offer I couldn’t refuse from Ant over at Turk Hit Box. I think he did a fabulous job with my blog. He’s giving away a few redesigns right now, actually.
If it hadn’t been for him, I would have kept on with the status quo, because I know squat about coding. I definitely wanted something unique though. I lucked out!
So far I’ve just tweaked a free Template.
Anybody know of any good/artistic blog designers?
I currently use a free template which I have done virtually nothing with. It seems to work for now. My focus is on getting in the habit of creating good content first hoping the traffic will follow. I would like to upgrade the look of my blog eventually and hope to do that within the next few months. I don’t know if I will be able to do it myself or not but I will try. Maybe my new Dummies book will help!
I’d be interested in hearing how much those that have a “custom” blog design have paid for it and whether the think it was worth the investment.
My main blog is a customisation of Chris Pearson’s Cutline. I’ve just changed from a 3-column layout to the old two column version and it looks so much cleaner.
I’ve just started a second site using WordPress, but the template is a magazine template by a guy called Upstart Blogger, and I absolutely love it. It’s put blogging in a whole new light for me.
The new theme’s at http://www.spiritofsaab.com and if you like the look then Upstart’s link is in the footer (not sure how many links I can post in this comment.
I’d love to go fully customised, but the money’s not quite there yet.
I’m using the free version of Semiologic. It lets me adjust the blog fairly easily using widgets. If I get enough income in 2008, I’ll CONSIDER paying the price for the “pro” version to get all of the bells and whistles.
I think for a blog with minimal traffic and revenue a free template is best, but once things take off a premium custom designed theme is definitely a must.
I like to design things myself. It’s better and completely unique.
I took a free template and changed it considerably to fit my needs. I know I needed something very eyecatching, yet simple so it was an absolute must to design my own banner.
I came up with the color schemes and logos but the content management system is by netlobo.com
I’m currently using a free template – Clean Copy by Cory Miller. Although the bones are recognizable if you compare mine to the original, I have changed colors, sizes, and layout of content elements (date, category, etc.)
I personally have just began blogging, so I don’t have the funds to hire someone to do a custom design for me. I look forward to the day when I can, though.
As for why that particular template? As Trollhattan Saab mentioned above, I prefer a clean design and spent some time finding one that I felt best showcased the content.
I have tinkered with about 127 themes for WordPress. After all that tinkering I found DK Ret which provides just about every thing a soul could want and then some. if not DK, then I often use Tarski.
Truth be told, I had a list of things the template MUST do. I would find a theme I liked and modify it to make it do what I wanted… It had to have pages and sub-pages support, it had to have the RSS icon at the top of the page and easily accessible and recognizable, it had to have a header I could modify (DK has a script built in to rotate header files), it had to make a WordPress site look and behave like a complete website… not just a blog.
I am a geek so I go out and look almost every week for other themes, and I test ’em and I play with ’em, but there’s no beating DK.
I might even have scraped up the cash to get a ‘pro’ designed theme, but it seems unnecessary with the features built into DK.
No affiliation, BTW… just a huge fan!
Normally I design the templates for blogs I am involved in from scratch or have someone in my company do it but for my latest blog (link by name) I was on a time crunch so I found one I really liked and modified it greatly to be a perfect fit for my needs.
I designed my own blog. I thought I was going to go crazy doing it because I haven’t used CSS or HTML in so long, so I basically had to reteach myself everything. I’m not too crazy about the design I have going on now, but hopefully I’ll be able to learn more and make a new template down the line :)
To be honest, I don’t see the point in paying for a template when basically everyone is capable of learning how to do it themselves since there are so many resources available online.
I used a free template that I tweaked heaps. It probably would have been quicker for me to start from scratch as I had very definite ideas about what I wanted, eg having the content on the left column so if the right columns take a while to load then at least the content is still showing and can be read.
Customised version of Cutline 1.1 for me. Minimal hacks to the code, but lots of css changes.
I picked the free template I used as a base because it had three columns and clean coding. (It’s an adaptation of Blogger’s Minima template.) After that I tweaked it to give my blog a unique look that would reflect its content to some degree.
I started with a free Blogger template and would like to change it but don’t know how :(
Some of us focus on the content and are stuck with the designs that others have kindly created. If there are easy to use editors, I sure don’t know about them.
I’ve used free templates for my blog that I’ve tweaked and added my own headers. 98% of them are 3-column so the info is more organized (although I realize now that I seem to have cluttered them up with misc stuff), but I’m thinking of simplifying and changing them to two-column.
I use a tweaked version of Greed by Small Potatoes, but expect to eventually hire a designer to make my site a bit more asthetically pleasing.
I created several unique designs before settling on one to launch with. I’m very happy with the design. It’s unique, functional, and gives me some room to grow.
But I probably would have been better off if I started writing months ago and launched with a free template.
Most blogs are too busy for me. Too many things to look at. I like it simple and plain. “Why can’t my cellphone be that way?” That is why I picked my template.
I wanted a seriously fast blog…wordpress can sometimes be a pain. The fastest loading template I found was 281, which was a little coarse.
I’m a big advocate of simplicity in design, which meant I had to make a bunch of modifications to make the blog look clean while preserving the speed optimization.
The result is a site that looks quite like http://codinghorror.com, but is seriously fast.
Looks like I’m one with the majority… =P
I won a gold bloggyaward recently and it feels great!
Would appreciate some feedback though.. I just did major revamp on my design yesterday:
Personal Development For The Book Smart
Feel free to offer some constructive criticism =)
Back in the day when I had more free time, I designed the template for my site. My CMS at the time was Mambo, and the template I created used a lot of tables for the layout.
Now, I’m wanting to make changes, but I feel that I should move the layout to something completely CSS based. Unfortunately, my limited knowledge and time are preventing me.
It’s a catch-22. Any designers out there want to make me an offer on a redesign?
I won a custom template from Emily at Swank Web Style. I told her what I wanted, supplied some pictures, and she designed the perfect blog for me.
I did it myself
I just tweaked a free template that I found on the WP-Themes website. It works well for me and keeps my blog looking pretty simple and clean.
Not sure what I’ll do when I’m up for a redesign, have seen a few really nice commercial templates recently that could fit the bill..
I started our original design, but Matt I met on Virb and we both had a passion for StarCraft II and hes working on the site for free now, so hes now a co-founder
My first sites years ago were all coded in notepad transcribed from the legal pads I wrote them on in during the van pool ride to and from work. After years of being away from online publishing I think freebies are great, because I could never duplicate my old model without six hands four of which holding coffee and two or three dozen notepads with more desk space than even the office depot show room has. So in my book freebies are a great thing for most users, but when you want to be original you are going to have to tweak it far beyond recognition or buck up the money for someone who knows what they are doing. Tweaking has been an eye opening learning experience and will probably put up several freebies of my own soon.
I did my own. I started off slowly evolving the default template, and when I grew familiar with the whole WordPress system, I was able to do my own.
I tweaked a free template myself, have done it for the dozens of blogs I manage. Partly because I love the sense of creativity it brings, partly because I’m a relentless ‘tester’ and try tweaking things to check response.
All success
Dr.Mani
I designed it myself, because I can. That said, I did it very quickly and it is a very simple theme right now – next year I’ll spend more time on a redesign and it should be much bigger and better – at the time I just needed something that worked.
My situation is different – I’ve had a static-page website for many years, and wanted to keep it that way, The blog was an add-on which had to be seamlessly integrated within the existing site.
I began with a very simple free WordPress theme, and used it to learn how the blog pages work. I then tweaked the theme to the point where it bears hardly any resemblance to what I started with. My theme folder now has only 5 files in it, and the blog shares the style sheets the website was already using.
It cost nothing except a lot of time and effort, and I learned heaps about CSS and page design which will come in very handy.
So far I’m using a free template tweaked out a bit and then translated it completely to spanish. I’m working in my own original design at this moment but wanted to test other things related to the blog while I’m designing my own theme.
I designed my own and will be featuring it on my portfolio soon http://www.blogthememachine.com
i downloaded from the net, then i edited it-removing the color, borders, etc.
I choose to use a free theme and then change a lot of it to my liking because I didn’t have the cash to pay someone to change it or create a custom theme for me. I don’t have the time or the know how to create an entire theme on my own. I am learning and will probably make my own theme eventually or hopefully my site will be making enough that I can afford to hire someone to make a custom theme.
I’m using my own design, which I created for a competition, but didn’t enter.
It’s now available to anyone who wants it for a small $20 fee, which all goes to charity.
It’s clean and simple, yet packed with useful built-in features (shameless plug).
Took a template and modified it, for mine. IIRC, I altered the colours and since then, have messed around with its code to be able to display ads in positions it wasn’t able to previously. But as for the design … I’m just a complete clod when it comes to making things look nice, so there’s not too much chance of me doing it myself ;)
I moved my blog from myspace so that a few readers who didn’t have myspace accounts to leave comments. I have as of yet a year later recieved these comments but I was only blogging about the music industry in order to help others so I merely threw up a premade template. After using it for several months I started adding small tweaks here and there. I would say for most extents and purposes it is mainly the same template.
This same template though will change as time goes by due to the creative impulses of my readers. For instance I just finsihed looking over graphics that have been designed for me specifically by a graphics designer, while I agreed to look and use if I liked them he went another step and designed a business card too. Only one example of how the template changes thanx to the interactive participation of my readers.
It is my readers that push me into more blogging and therefore forcing me to look into monetization of my blog. Much of this improvement and my written lists of improvements is thanx to Darren and ProBlogger.
I find it weird that there are 38 comments so far but only 2 votes, including mine.
Whoops, never mind. It must be a bug in the blog software or something. After I voted, it showed the result bars and 2 people voting. But when I clicked on the View Results link, then it showed 103 people who voted.
honestly, i prefer designing the template of my blog myself… :-p
I was on a free template but, I recently designed my own theme as it gives a brand to the blog. Check it out at http://www.tecfre.com . Stand a chance to win free ad space. Cheers
I considerably tweaked the Prosense theme for my site. It doesn’t look that amazing though, but I’m consistently improving the look.
I’m using the great “Revolution Theme Magazine” by Brian Gardner, really satisfy about it ! :)
Mine was a bit between paid and designed myself. I got the logo designed for me then used that to inspire me to design the rest :)
I actually hired 2 designers to create my unique website and blog design! A friend of mine has designed the new look http://www.musoswire.com (new design not live yet), and then I paid Daniel over at DailyBlogTips.com to translate the concept into a WordPress theme for blog.musoswire.com. It’s just gone live, and I’m *really* happy with it – can’t wait for the full site to get the makeover! :o)
Designed it myself and actually contributed some themes for the WordPress community.
I tweaked a free template, but then again I work as a web designer ;)