Comment areas on blogs don’t have to be uninspired, and to that effect, Blog Design Blog has posted a great article that showcases thirty different comment designs that will hopefully get you from using a boring default comment setup.
Comment design is an art. Comment design is often overlooked by a lot of web designers when […]

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I recently had a chance to speak with Chris Garrett, owner of Chris Garrett Media Ltd about his new company The 449, which sells beautiful, custom themes for £449.
So, lets start with a little about the 449, and its history. Who is involved, and you mentioned somewhere that you had worked on this idea before?
I […]

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Smashing Magazine has put together a list of 45 excellent blog designs from various different publishing platforms like WordPress, Expression Engine, Movable Type and others.
What really caught my eye is that our intrepid designer over at Design Disease made the list.
A big congrats to everyone listed as there are some absolutely amazing blog designs. For […]

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I found this on RajDash.com.
There are two contests currently running that will help bloggers get a new logo for their blogs, so if you are looking to revamp your image, or just get your first real logo, then you will want to check these out.
Randa Clay Design
Randa is offering 2 prizes: a free custom blog […]

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Ben of Binary Moon has taken the custom WordPress login a step further as one of his series of WordPress Tricks and Tips.
He created a plugin as well as an image template for the custom WordPress login.

The plugin itself sits in the plugins folder alongside the images - which you can change as required. […]

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Boxes and Arrows has a great post up about what they call the “myth of the fold”. The fold is the area where the screen ends and you have to scroll down to see more.
Traditionally, you don’t want to put too much below the fold, especially advertisements and another things because users leave before ever […]

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I try to keep a keen eye on the industry that helps design, develop, and manage blogs, and that arena has a new entrant with Blogging Squared, a group from Ottawa, Ontario Canada led by someone I know very well, John Wiseman. Blogging Squared provides services like custom blog design, training sessions, blog development, search […]

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Autoblog is one of my favorite vehicle news blogs, and I had to admit, that because I only read it via my feed reader, I didn’t really notice its new design, and quickly skipped over the post about it, but when Matt (thanks Matt) wrote me to let me know that not only had they […]

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One of the hardest parts of personal branding in my opinion, is the logo. A logo can decide what people think of you, as a professional logo can say volumes about a person, brand, or site. Bloggers far too often forget that a logo can help brand them. Our logo here at Blogging Pro is […]

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Ben Bleikamp, a respected designer and interesting writer has posted his reasonings for ignoring your blogs, and quite simply it is because you aren’t showing your best content.
I browse through 100 blogs a day. I subscribe to 51. That means that when I read your blog I forget about it. It’s your fault. You haven’t […]

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Smashing Magazine has put together a large list of CSS tips and tricks from some great people, including Jonathan Snook, whom I look up to.
CSS isn’t always easy to deal with. Depending on your skills and your experience, CSS coding can sometimes become a nightmare, particularly if you aren’t sure which selectors are actually […]

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One of the hardest parts of design can be picking out a proper color scheme for the design. Some designers use photos, others use their understanding of color theory to pick out that perfect palette and then there are people like me that need others to help get the right colors to go together. Over […]

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Icons can sometimes be the difference between a nice looking theme and a plain looking one, as we continue to try to create new designs for WordPress blogs, and other blogging software, we increasingly need new icons to give it that extra edge.
DHTML Site has compiled a list of free icon resources, and while […]

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An amazing article over on Digital Web Magazine caught my eye, as most of their articles do, called Redesigning the ExpressionEngine Site. If you hadn’t noticed, their site got a big overhaul in design, and this article gives you a complete rundown of how it came to be. I love these types of articles as […]

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Chris Pearson is a designer I really respect, and recently he has given another tip out that while some keen web developers might know, most people playing around with editing themes, might not. It is that the changes you make could be put in a special custom file so you don’t have to re-change the […]

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Frontpage is being replaced by a new project called Expression Web.
Expression Web will hopefully do more with web standards and XML, XHTML and style-sheets, CSS and XSLT.
Q. How does Expression Web compare to Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 and Visual Studio as a Web design/development tool?
A. Expression Web is a new product for professional […]

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Jonathan Snook is an accomplished programmer, and while he doesn’t consider himself a designer, his designs are something I am very envious of.
He lays out some tips that he tries to keep in mind when doing a design:
1. Make it bigger.
2. Make it closer to the top of the page.
[…]

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Over on BrainFuel, there are some tips for those looking to design a website which of course applies to creating a design for a blog.
He mentions things like typography, content density, dealing with the details, and whitespace.
I, personally, have trouble with typography. It is not my strong suit, and I know it, but BrainFuel recommends […]

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It looks like four seconds is considered the average cut-off mark now for getting something readable on the screen of your visitors, before they stop waiting and move on, so optimizing your site is ever more important, even with the adoption of broadband around the world, you still need to make sure your site can […]

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Over at Web Design from Scratch there is a great article on his ideal web design process. It asks many questions that people should think about when designing a site, and I think for us bloggers, there are things we should be thinking about even when we are just picking a theme.
He goes through in […]

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