Blogs and their Design

We all know that blog is something that almost everyone that does have a web site call it business website or personal site has a blog. WordPress blog is one of the best and easiest to use, the flexibility and simplicity of WordPress made it so even a newbie webmaster that has some to non knowledge of HTML or PHP to be able to install and modify a blog in his server. The performance of WordPress also made so that webmasters showed love to it and started to build free themes that people could download for free and use it in their blog. Within just a few months the themes database had thousands of free themes to be download.

Even tho wordpress theme designers showed their creativity they were powerless in front of all these blogs that are being launched on the net every single minute and hence we got a internet full of blogs that look similar one to each other. The little advanced webmasters made some changes to the free themes to appeal as unique as possible. After the dot com’s mogul John Chow new design in the bloggers world this new trend made a boom and all bloggers started to update their themes and hire designers that can design them a unique blog design. Even SEO Optimization used a free wordpress themes and was thinking about designing a new theme before even John Chow released his theme, but since the owner of this SEO Blog is a lazy guy he left others beat him and seemed like a copy-cat of John Chow. Few weeks after John Chows new design SEO Optimization managed to have a brand new blog design.

The design of a blog for a professional blogger is very important, it is his/her online business cart. The appearance of the blog design represents how serious the blogger is about his blog. The freedom that PhotoShop gives to designers is limited only by the designers creativity, hence the good looking designs are those that have good graphics (without any doubts) but some designs overpass the limit of graphics and than that beautiful design is not effective at all, in terms of SEO and from visitors experience.

On John Chows shout out blog sponsors post John thanked also Darin Carter and as a side note he wrote Darin is so popular that someone who has with no understanding of copyright ripped off his blog design. Since we are still under the new design trend effect curiousity was stronger so I had to check Darin’s new blog design.

The design is lovely, it did took 2-3 seconds to load the top part for me, but since only the title and few lines of the first post was visible (as in most blogs) I had to scroll down with smooth scrolling. That was the moment I wished I never scrolled lower. As I was scrolling lower and lower the whole screen was waving in front of me and I was like well, okey, this is a new but used computer, the memory card, the graphic card and hard disk is brand new tho and I still did not had the chance to torture this computer the way I should, than WHY in the hell the screen is waving when i scroll down? The design was made by Nate Whitehill, the same guy who designed JohnChow.com and I have to admit he does some beautiful designs but once again he made the same mistakes.

To be honest, I did read only the post on the design copy-cat by Darin and I really left his blog right away as I could not stand the design to wave all over my screen. The bad part is that now I don’t even know if Darin has some useful content because I could not stand the waving screen and the pretty design is not effective anymore (for me).

Would you prefer a professionally designed blog like Darin.cc and to get your visitors screen to wave or you would prefer a design like Catherine Lawson’s simple, elegant, nothing too much but yet it loads in a second? I still prefer Cath’s design, and the fast loading is the part that did not stopped me to surf even in the archives of Catherine Lawsons Business Blog simple and effective.

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