Elements of a Uniquely Personal Blog Design
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In yesterday’s post I discussed how the design of a personal blog can be an enjoyable experience because of the many design freedoms it offers. The key with a personal blog design is to let your personality shine through.
There are a number of ways in which this can be done through your writing and commenting style, but it can also be done in your design. Listed below are just some of the different might use to go about making a design that little bit more unique.
- Header design. The blog’s heading is arguably the best place to be creative. Let your heading reflect who you are. What are your hobbies and interests? Why not put photos of them in your header?
- Color scheme. Often in design you must choose colors based on a site’s previous branding and design, or to fit with a certain logo. With personal blog design, you choose your favorite color. What can you learn about a person from their favorite color?
- Personal photograph. In your personal blog, people want to know about you. It goes without saying that in such an environment, putting a face to the words goes a long way.
- Your own style. When people just want to get in to your blog, get what they need, then get out, they enjoy a clean, minimalist look which helps them with their goals. With a personal blog, readers may not be after anything in particular, and so you have the freedom to be a little more creative (But not too much. Your blog still needs to be usable!)
- Post signatures. In line with using a photograph to emphasise the human aspect of your blog, why not replicate another human trait, signatures? A person’s signature tends to be a unique way of identifying the person. In an internet of limited typefaces, we lose that distinction in our writing. Why not bring it back, by adding a signature image to the end of your posts like Mommy Zabs does?
- Make your category list prominent. Personal blogs are many and varied. You never quite know what you’re going to get. By putting your personality clearly into your blog, you clear up some of this confusion. A good way of further clarifying your blog is a prominent category list. The list of categories is essentially a list of your interests, and will help readers tremendously. Of course, you may not want to go overboard with your interests!
- Playful widgets. Provided you don’t go over the top, it can be nice to add something special to your blog just because it’s fun to have. For instance, the MyBlogLog widget is semi-useful because it puts a face to your readers, helping with the personal aspect of things. One or two dips such dips into the pool of the weird and wonderful widget is not going to hurt much on a personal blog.
The possibilities are quite limitless. What other ways can you come up with?
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About the Author
Michael Martin
Michael Martin is the founder of Pro Blog Design. He works as a freelance web designer, loves WordPress, and has an unhealthy addiction to smilies.
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Nice article, thanks. At the moment I am preparing a redesign/relaunch of my own site. Since it also includes a blog, I was wondering whether you could write something about what definitely needs to go into a weblog archive. Of course you have the basic list, but there must be something that everybody is missing, that works exceptionally well, etc.
Signatures in blogs are starting to be used too common if you ask me, the personal touch by it vanishes since the scribblings are all pretty much the same at a first glance.
Photographs are a tricky issue for a couple of reasons:
On a personal blog you give a great load of detail about your own life, add a picture to that and you’re making yourself very vulnerable to the outside world for either having someone trying to take on your identity or some freak starting to bother you in real life.
It can have a negative effect on visitors, let’s face it we’re all quite visually focussed. It’s just a natural human thing, heck it counts for nature in general even. Usually on the net this doesn’t matter since there is no picture of a person to judge one by making content the thing to go for, but if you reintroduce the image of yourself along many people might just browse on again simply based on the image going along.
Own style and header design along with that is what I’d definitely say as the most important aspect when it comes to giving attention along with of course the writing itself. Try not to use any default theme but add your own touches to it so people can recognize it’s you who made it. Make it reflect your personality, although it doesn’t have to be 100% accurate still it should in some way be the same as how you “look” in real life. Simply by looking at clothes, hairstyle, optional tattoos and piercings, accessories, etcetera you can pretty much tell what a person is probably like. The same should go for a personal blog.
Rather than using something default or trying to copy “the big guys” it should be reflecting you, as a person.
I think my blog got a quite unique style and the color I’m using is a color I started to like back when I redesigned my website the a while ago.
I believe the design reflects my style: Cool and clean, easy on the eyes. The way I prefer to write any kind of code ;)
A photo of myself…well, I dropped it a while ago to avoid what you said, Slevi. I even reduced the information given about my location. Only a mobile number (can block/ban unknown calls if I want to) and a contact form/email are available. At the end I think it is up to you if you prefer giving out all your details or not.
Signatures….hm…na, not my taste. It wouldn’t work for my blog anyway.
And widgets? I decided to reduce the size of the page as much as possible. Maybe I add a widget or two in the future, but right now I like it how it is.
@Slevi: Good ideas on styling ideas, maybe I will have another look at my design and see if I can add something :)
oh…and there are indeed too many people using default/copied designs and it isn’t that difficult to adjust a design if you want to.
Dominik – Your current design looks great (I love that artsy look. I imagine you’re a fan of Happy Cog, Jason Santa Maria etc.? Few others can pull off that style. :) ). I’ll be looking forward to seeing the new design.
I don’t really understand your request though. Could you clarify a little for me please? Do you mean you’d like a list of what all blogs should have/do?
Slevi – Putting your identity on the internet is always dangerous (There are no photos of me). However, it can be just as dangerous without a photo. As you gain recognition, your name alone will be enough to set some people off.
As for juding based on a photo; that would only happen if the reader was quite stereotypical (Though I agree with you to a point. Personally, an image can’t make me think less of a blogger. On the other hand, it has never made me think more of them either. I just don’t care what they look like either way! xD ). Many people have stated that they do like putting faces to names though.
And well said in the last 2 paragraphs. Couldn’t agree more. :) (And I loved your examples of where to find inspiration!)
Marco – It seems you’ve thought about your design well. Every blog is different, and what works for one may not necessarily work for another. It’s important to always make your own decisions for your blog, like you’ve done here.
First of all thanks for the link :)
If I could only keep a design for more that 1.5- 2 months. I have design A.D.D. and constantly re-image which I know is anti-branding, but I can’t seem to help myself. not china made .net is/will continue to be more consistant as I understand the importance of branding and It would be counter productive to do otherwise there. For my personal blog, I just don’t know how much I care about being a brand- though I have tried.
Interesting thing on subtitles.. Mine ended up becoming the primary name. Technically I’m mommyzabs .com, but I loved “motherhood is not a cussword” so much that I made it my main focus.
One thing that is fun about a personal blog is that you can totally blow the rules and learn from major mistakes and not care. I feel like I have tried so many things… and even though at times I worry about it too much- in the end I know it doesn’t matter!
Great posts. Keep it up.
Micheal. What I meant is a little bit like a list of what blog archives should have, yes. But not to the extent that it becomes an actual list.
I have opened a forum post over at cssbeauty and up to now I have heard that a search feature is probably the most important, followed closely by a category archive. This enables people who know what they are looking for to find it, while those who are casually browsing can do that by category. If this is the case, a month/year archive doesn’t seem to be that important. What do you think?
In my opinion that’s something which varies greatly for each blog, if your entries can be categorized well into let’s say a maximum of 10~15 categories it’s probably not a bad idea to give a category archive. Especially if the content is “timeless”.
On the other hand if your blog is 100% a personal blog and more of a diary the time based archive would probably be more logical since the actual entries will follow each other up in a chronological order.
If you’re writing stories on your blog which take place over multiple entries then you can just as well forget using categories unless the category is the name of the story.
Mommy Zabs – I never actually thought of the title like that, until you mentioned it now. Somehow between your commenting name here, the domain, and your signature, I had the site name firmly fixed in my head as Mommy Zabs. xD
Dominik – Ahh, I understand now, and I’ve read the post your wrote at cssbeauty. There isn’t a whole lot I could say. At the basis of it all, you have your content. Everything else you do is about that content, so you add categories to help people browse. Search to help people find content. The only other essentials are RSS subscriptions links and easy (inline) commenting. :)
Everything else is decoration, and the decorations used will vary from blog to blog.
The only thing I do not have yet is my personal photograph, I’ve plans to get one up but it’s just that I need to find the right time and place to get the best shot of myself. :P
All my sites have custom design BUT I wonder how bad would I fare if my site was reviewed. :D Nevertheless, I’m hoping to learn more from better designers.
I had a look at your side, goldfries. I like the design although the page isn’t W3C compliant…then again, it is something I always have a look at because I prefer valid code. Anyway, it is your site after all :)
goldfries – You’d hold up well I’d say. Everyone (including PBD!) has things that could be improved upon, so I’m sure there’d be something to comment on, but there’s a lot of positive things to comment on. :D
Who knows? I might get around to it someday. :D
Marco, How is it not W3C compliant when W3C validator said “This Page Is Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict!”?
Did I miss something? :)
Thanks Michael!
well, the W3C validator isn’t perfect. I use one or two more tools to validate an HTML document. Of course non of these tools are perfect, however, some of them give me an error for your page. I will have a closer look at it later maybe an update messed the settings up or so which lead to wrong results :)
One thing I saw as I had a short look at the source code was a malformed URI on line 115 of the main page. If I find more, I will send you an email :)
Marco – What other tools? I know there are other validators, but in terms of pure coding, the W3C one is the only one worth mentioning usually?
Michael – I just wrote an article about the tools I’m using. That’s why it took me a bit to reply to your question :)
Will read the article now Marco. No doubt it will be an interesting set of tools. :)
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I like all these ideas except for using our favorite color as the layout. This is not helping becauseif you like bright colors, readers eyes will easily get tired. I prefer to use a calming layout that can give comfort to the readers while reading my articles.
These are some really nice tips for both beginners as well as the experienced bloggers. Creating and having a successful personal blog can be difficult but it is definitely a nice experience.
Nice post
Surely, this tips very helpful for me that need advice to build my personal blog design. Thanks very much for this nice article and many other nice article that I’ve found on this nice Web.
After working through a few of the most appealing looking ones to you, you should have more than a few ideas for creating your own, unique effects!
A really useful post for me, designing blogs is something I don’t do regularly, the websites are more for full CMS purposes that blogging but I think that reading this has made me realise how much I want to design my own blog and make it completely personal to me. Thanks!