Beauty is Only Skin Deep: Designing Blogs For Feeds, Search Engines and Audience

Crabby Night Owl’s post, “Substance Not Style is King”, caught my attention: About 20% of the hits CNO gets come via the newsfeeds, and I wanted to see what those feeds looked like when they’re read. What I saw was plain, unformatted text, devoid of any style that I may have imparted to it on […]

Designing WordPress Themes For the Slowing Web

Jonathan Bailey of the Blog Herald wrote about Surfing the Slow Web, a summary of his recent experience trying to connect to the Internet as an evacuee from Hurricane Gustav. While most web designers are pushing the limits of heavy handed design towards high bandwidth, the world still doesn’t work that fast or wide. According […]

Weekly Digest: More Blogging Tips Book Reviews, Lorelle on WordPress in Top 5 Blogs About Blogging, Blog Writing Contests, and More

The Weekly Digest from Lorelle on WordPress this week features more wonderful reviews and recommendations of my new book – the orders are overwhelming! There are also some blogging contests with my book as the reward. If you are interested in the book, I’ve got more details on what it’s about and how to order. […]

Heat Map Layout of Top 10 Technorati Blogs

ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse points us to Healthbolt’s “Color Coded Above the Fold Composite Map of the Top 10 Blogs on Technorati”, a “heat map” of the most popular blogs layout. As can be predicted, the hottest spots for advertising points in a layout are across the top and down the right side of a web […]

Alex King Explores The Next Generation in Blogs

Alex King has rebuilt his blog and started an extensive series about the process and the discoveries he made about the redesign and “new thinking” about how blogs work and how users use blogs. In the first article on this ongoing series, King covers an overview of the changes he’s made to the site. The […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Designing WordPress Themes for the Public

An article I wrote during the past year that got a lot of attention, and criticism, was “WordPress Theme Designers: Slapping You Upside the Head”. It was a rant, but also a guide to help those who design WordPress Themes for public release, and to WordPress.com and those who choose and prepare WordPress Themes for […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Designing WordPress Themes

WordPress Theme design is fairly unique in web design techniques as a WordPress Theme isn’t just about the design of the website, it is about web design based upon generated and controllable content. Programming code helps to create each page on a WordPress blog, influencing the look and feel of every element of a WordPress […]

Designing Themes for WordPressMU – Fill In All The Details

This WordPress Theme called “Pool” I’m currently using is designed by Borja Fernandez and works well for my blog here on wordpress.com. We don’t have a lot of choices here, but I liked the look and some of the details, but after a few months using this Theme, there are a lot of details I […]

Designing a WordPress Theme: Building a Post Sandbox

When designing and testing a WordPress Theme, or any web page design, it helps to put the design through the maximum amount of testing. In other words, you have to test all the code that might appear on a web page. Bold in one WordPress Theme may look different in another. Link styles change from […]

Blog Exercises: How Many Words in a Link?

How many words should you put into a link? Is there a rule? There isn’t a rule but there are good standards and practices. These state that two words should be the minimum, and only enough words to compel someone to click through to the linked source. The words must also imply the link’s destination […]

Strip Down Your Blog: CSS Naked Day

Get ready to go naked. On April 9th, 2008, hundreds, possibly thousands, of blogs and websites will go naked in honor of CSS Naked Day. Join fellow WordPress bloggers in honoring web designers and WordPress Theme builders by going naked. This is the third year of the annual CSS Naked Day which honors web design […]

Ask Yourself How You Should Get Me to Read Your Blog

In How to Get Me to Read Your Blog, Thord Daniel Hedengren tells us how to convince him, and others, to read your blog. Chances are I’m not reading your blog. That’s not because I don’t like you, most likely I don’t even know you exist, and that’s your fault. Yes, you heard me. Your […]

Should You Design Your Own Blog?

A while ago, a popular blogger, asked me to review his blog design for improvements. Just so you know, I do this for a living, and my review isn’t cheap. 😉 I gave him my review, pointing out the flaws, misalignments between identity and design, and improvements that would not just help his page ranking […]

Feeds Change How You Write Links

Feed are changing how we write links in our blog posts. Have you noticed? There are two types of links. Absolute links are the most commonly found links in web pages today. They go directly to the source such as: https://lorelle.wordpress.com/2007/02/25/monetizing-wordpress-plugins/ A relative link is one that links relative to the page without the full […]

Bloggers Share Step-by-Step Tips for Increasing Blog Usability

Twenty Usability Tips for Your Blog — Condensed from Dozens of Bloggers’ Experiences is a great step-by-step guide on how to improve the usability of your blog, and improve your visitor’s experience. I’m particularly fond of the About Page point. 😉 But I also have long been a fan of “Archive by Topic Not Date” […]