Pro Blog Design

eBusiness is the latest theme release from Elegant Themes. We’re going to take a look at it, what it’s done well and what not so well, and what we can learn from it.

eBusiness comes in 3 color schemes and features quite a lot of JavaScript usage. Fire up the demo in a new tab as we look at the theme in more detail.

Before we start though; Nick from Elegant Themes sponsored this post, but there are no affiliate links so there is no advantage to me in telling you to buy the theme. We’ll just be taking a look at it from a design point of view and if you’d like to buy it for your own site, the details will be at the end of the post.

What Has Been Done Well?

• Header design – The header is very strong and distinctive. The blog title has been highlighted and because the theme comes with PSDs, anyone could edit this to their blog’s name and never need a separate logo.

  The header navigation has also been done very well, clean but noticeable. The real win for the header though is that it does all this without overpowering the rest of the page.

• JavaScript Navigation Effects – Mouseover the 3 tabs on the home page and you’ll find they slide up and down. Do the same with the About link in the header and you’ll see a lovely nav-bubble fades in. These effects are simple but elegant, exactly the way a JavaScript effect should be.

• Sliding Blog Entries – The eBusiness theme is about business first and blogging second. The homepage features a great little box that pulls in the latest blog entries and displays them in a very concise, easy-to-use, slider. This same effect could easily be used on a regular blog to pull in featured posts or a certain category.
• Wide variety of color. The background is light brown, the footer is dark brown, the header is orange, the content is somewhere between yellow and brown and the sidebar is green. That’s a great variety of color, and it all works well together.

  And proving that a design isn’t dependent on the colors it was first designed with, it still looks great in the other colorful variations! Check out eBusiness Smooth and eBusiness Radiate to see.

• Detailed comment designs – Quite often the comments in a theme don’t get a lot of thought put into them and you end up with plain rectangles and leave it at that. The eBusiness comments use textures like the page background, colors from the rest of the site, gravatars and a great threading effect.

What Could Be Done Better?

• Where do I click? – It can take a few tries at first to work out where to click on the home page. The “Read More” button in the sliding panels makes sense when you think about it of course, but my first attempts were on the panel’s title and then on the large image. I also tried clicking the orange banner further down the page later because it stood out as different from the brown one above it.

  A wide variety of color is great and the design effects here are fantastic, but you have to be careful not to let that get in the way of easy browsing. A few small changes/extra links here could go a long way.

• Banners that stand out too well – The orange banners beneath the post title and commenter names look fantastic, but they almost stand out too well. Load up a post page and what do you notice first? The post title or the text in the banner?

  The banners are one of the nicest design touches in the site, but if I were to use this theme I’d consider making them smaller, or changing the information in them to something more important. Maybe even your post tags for the post one and the commenter’s URL in the comments one?

NB – The 2 points above may be unfairly influenced by the fact this is a sample site with dummy content.  The whole idea behind lorum ipsum text is that you aren’t supposed to notice it. The effect could well be much less on a title using real words.

Conclusion

You could probably tell this from the first glance, but I’ll say it anyway; eBusiness is a beautiful theme. There isn’t one inch of the site that hasn’t been well thought about. The 2 flaws I commented on aren’t major flaws and definitely open to interpretation.

If I had to sum up what makes eBusiness great in one line it would be that it has combined a creative but restrained use of JavaScript with a beautiful design. That’s something we could all try to do more.

Get eBusiness For Yourself

eBusiness has just been released as the latest addition to the Elegant Themes themes club. To get it, unlimited access to 22 other gorgeous themes and everything Nick makes for the next year costs just $19.95.

Click here to see the sign-up page and get your hands on the files now.

Let us know what you think of eBusiness here. Love it or hate it?