8 elements of a good blog theme or template
By arin2u | November 10, 2007
Topics: Web Design |
In the web, there are lots of websites that provide free themes/templates for blogs. When you browse them, you may be confused while choosing one for your blog. There are some which attract your eyes with great color combination. Some may be designed as per the technical requirement. Some are full of colorful images. The requirement changes with the objective/purpose/subject area of blog. But there are some common elements of a perfect theme or template.
From human perspective:
1. As many of you know that visitors don’t read contents of a page. They simply scan it at a first glance. So you need to represent your content in such a way that user can find easily what they are looking for. For that, your theme/template should have:
- Good visible navigation.
- Systematic ordering of information in a logical way.
- Use of different font style and font faces.
- Use of proper colors and style to differentiate between two objects.
- Use of brightness/darkness of objects and background.
- Good neat and clean appearance at first glance.
2. A blog theme/template provider should have plenty of room for the users feedback. If they are able provide prompt support to the users and make continuous improvement in the look and working of the the theme/template, the users will be happy.
From technical perspective
3. HTML and CSS validation is just like keeping the code of your theme/template syntactically correct. To check if the html is validated, use W3C Validator and CSS validator to validate style sheet. It’s difficult to say if it is required for search engines or not because a number of top ranking websites do not have validated markup and css. But search engines can read CSS. So you can stop them catching you spamming (by hiding your text) with the css.
4. The theme/template you choose should have good compatibility with different web browsers specially the popular ones like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera etc. People also use different screen resolution (most viewed: 1024×768) for viewing web pages. For that, a liquid layout (that fits well in any resolution) will be an ideal one for increasing the usability.
5. A good theme or template has verbose comments in the code section to understand the starting/ending and reason for using the section. Perhaps you may need to change something after 1 year, you can be sure of where you are making the change based on the written comments.
6. If you are using wordpress blog, check if the theme is widget-ready. This option will help you adding/modifying/deleting contents easily.
7. A good theme always has a customized 404 page. You can get an idea of visitors experience when they land up to a 404 page. You can always put a search box and a contact form in that page to help visitors navigate to your other pages.
8. A good theme should have a search-engine friendly layout to help better indexing of a page. If you want search engines to crawl you keyword specific content to meet the keyword proximity demand.
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This is Arindam aka arin2u. I love blogging and I do it in simple ways. I like learning new things. SEO, internet marketing are my niche fields.
It’s a very good post on choosing a blog theme or tempalte. You have suggested some good points on this. Hope webmasters or the general bloggers will learn from this suggestion and try to implement these tips.
Just like the element that we see i.e water, fire , air and so on, these ELEMENTs that you have mentioned forms an intregal part of net planet.
It will help us a lot if we remember this ELEMENTory things.
The blog content of the post is really informative.Keep us updated with such valued post.
Thanks
Very effective post. Many of us know some of these points but together all of them in one place, I haven’t seen it anywhere earlier. As blogs are getting more importance nowadays so its design and architecture is gaining more importance.
Thanks for such a post.
Good template is relative in definition but in general it should be analyzed for user experience at regular times.
Most of the blog templates are made as general themes, you need one made for you by doing personalization.
There are lots of free themes available in the web. You feel confused as to what you should opt for. Here I’ve written about the general parameters to judge before choosing a theme. Anyways thanks to all for reading this and putting your valuable feedbacks and continuously encouraging me.
i think it’s a great post describing design.
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