Pro Blog Design

Dropdown menus are a great way of including a long list of links without cluttering up your page. The issue though is that they can be hard to style, but look quite ugly if you don’t. There isn’t a lot of flexibility with HTML’s <select> tags.

Well, why not do it with plain HTML instead?

In this post, I’m going to walk you through how I’ve set up the blogroll in our upcoming redesign. Load up the example page to see how our final product will look.

Read More »

In this tutorial, you will see how to display your sub-categories in an animated dropdown, and how to create similar dropdowns for sub-pages as well. You’ll even be able to highlight the page your reader is currently on.

The code is written by milo, and you  can see a demo of it in use in one of her free WordPress themes; Nash (Check out the two nav menus in the black header).

The code is very easy to set up and you will have no trouble there. You will want to edit the CSS in the end to make it match your theme, but even for beginners, a little meddling will get you through.

Read More »

As bloggers, we all want to put as much content as we can on the page, but make it look like as little as we can.

It’s an interesting paradox, which doesn’t always have an answer.

In certain circumstances however, there are indeed ways of cheating the rule, and serving your readers better by doing so.

In this article, I will talk about the 5 main options available to you, and by knowing them, you might find ways to apply them to your own blog.

Read More »

Photo by *Micky* Categories are very easy to set up in a blog. So easy in fact, that we can often get carried away and end up with dozens of categories, all clogging up space in our sidebars. Rather than deleting these categories, we can remove the clutter by linking the categories into groups.

We then show only the group titles in the sidebar, and when a group title is clicked, the list of categories in that group expands beneath it. You can see a demo here.

This solution is very easy to implement, will remove the clutter for the vast majority of your users. For your users, and search engines, who have disabled Javascript, the complete list of categories will be shown as normal (And for the code junkies, it’s also XHTML valid!)

Read More »

Arguably, the most important feature in your blog’s design is its usability. Can the reader get what they want? A large part of that is giving them the space to manoeuvre unhindered by clutter and superfluous gadgets.

In order to keep your blog clutter-free, you must be ruthless with your sidebar content. There are thousands of Wordpress plugins available, and it is very tempting to install them all. The wise blogger knows to add only the options which will be beneficial to the user, which begs the question;

How are the monthly archive links useful?

In most cases, they aren’t. The monthly archives are a remnant from when blogs were literally online diaries. When the posts are a biography of someone’s life, then it can indeed be very interesting to look back to what they were like in the past. The monthly archives were also a lot less hassle than properly categorising posts.

Read More »