How to Make Blog Themes

Posted on October 26th, 2009 by Marck

(No Ratings Yet)

Loading ...

No Comments (Post Comment)

Republish

Blogs are considered by many people as personal spaces that they can use to convey their thoughts, opinions, or share events and insights in their daily lives. Yet the personal nature of blogging does not have to end with what you put in your blog; you can make your blog speak to your own preferences and aesthetics by using your own custom theme. Here are some ways to help you make blog themes.

Coding Elements

Regardless of what blogging platform you use (WordPress, Blogspot, Typepad, or Livejournal), coding elements make it possible for your blog to be viewed in the same way across browsers and platforms. Coding a blog from scratch is a challenge for even the most experienced and knowledgeable designers. It pays to know some coding elements to help you along as you make your own blog theme:

HTML. Hypertext Markup Language is the core of a blog theme, although on an aesthetic level, you don’t have to play around with or tweak HTML elements on your blog.
CSS. Most of your design elements will be tweaked and altered on the level of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). From CSS, you can alter the layout, typography, and color schemes of your blog.
Flash. Flash makes it possible to add slideshows, dynamic headers, and other elements that can make your site look good and impress first-time visitors.

The most people will go for editing blog themes is to alter hexadecimal values for colors. When editing CSS, make sure that the text is visible and that the typography is easy to read. Themes that are easy on the eyes also get more hits.

Template Elements

Almost all blogs share the same structure for template elements. The text area contains the blog entry, and usually takes up most of the space in the site area. Some people may start a template from scratch, but it is often easier to take an existing template and modify it (provided that the end-user license agreement to the theme allows you to edit the

There are three particular areas that you should pay attention to when designing your blog themes:

The header area contains the name or header image of your blog, and may sometimes contain navigational tools for people to browse through your blog.
The footer area usually contains copyright and theme information. For some blog themes, the footer may also contain links to pages, posts, and other sites.
Sidebars. Most of the tweaking in a template takes place on the sidebars. Most links, pages, posts, and RSS feeds are placed on the sidebar, but you may also place advertisements and chatboxes or other widgets on this part of the template.

Layout

The way you arrange your entries can help make your blog easier to navigate and to read. You can choose among many styles and methods to lay out entries, although there are two styles that you can use for your blog theme layout:

Chronological layouts are particularly useful for blog themes, where you can post entries in chronological or reverse chronological order. Chronological layouts are particularly useful for blog sites written by a single author or user.
Grid/magazine type. You can turn a blog site into an online magazine, especially if you wish to share news and insights to a large audience. Magazine-type layouts can help you arrange your entries in such a way that people can select particular posts easier.

Remember that themes make up only a small part of what you should do with your blog; if you have a really good theme with bad content, you won’t attract the number of readers you want to have for your personal site. With these steps, a meticulous eye for code, and a lot of patience, you can make your own personal blog theme to wow your audience with.