Monday, December 10th, 2007
I haven’t posted anything about free CSS templates for a while, simply because I haven’t seen anything worth mentioning. But CSS Creme, which is yet another CSS gallery site, has released five free CSS templates, which are real eye candy! Use them for your sites, or just for inspiration! One thing they’re missing, though, is a license of any kind. CSS Creme guys - if you’re reading this, I highly recommend putting a TOS (Terms of Service) somewhere on your site, and maybe a license file in the download zip file.
Aside from the free templates, the site has some pretty good stuff on it. First of all, their gallery has some amazing sites in it, which they say they pick themselves. You can browse the gallery according to category or color. They also have some fabulous free wallpaper, which could spice up your desktop, as well as interesting links in their News section.
CSS Creme free CSS templates»
![[Slashdot]](http://slashdot.org/favicon.ico)
![[Digg]](http://digg.com/favicon.ico)
![[Reddit]](http://reddit.com/favicon.ico)
![[del.icio.us]](http://del.icio.us/favicon.ico)
![[Facebook]](http://www.facebook.com/favicon.ico)
![[Technorati]](http://technorati.com/favicon.ico)
![[Google]](http://www.google.com/favicon.ico)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://www.stumbleupon.com/favicon.ico)
Posted in CSS Templates | Tags: CSS, inspiration | 13 Comments »
Tuesday, December 4th, 2007
We WordPressers are always on the search for that perfect WordPress theme. There are a lot of sites out there that display and feature WordPress themes, but I just came across blog.biz and I thought it was worth noting since it is different than others I’ve seen, not just because of the themes there, but because of the layout. Instead of having posts lined up in chronological order, this site gives you a screen full of thumbnails. They are obviously using one of the thumbnail techniques that we mentioned in our recent posts on using thumbnails in WordPress, and it’s interesting to see.
If you hover over a thumbnail, it tells you the name of the theme, and if you click on it, it takes you to the post page for that theme, where you can see a bigger screen shot and a short description of the theme. There, you can click on the theme and go to the theme’s home page.
In addition, the bottom of the site has descriptive tags for all the themes. So if you’re looking for a theme with a certain width, color, or style, you just click on the tag and you get a screen full of thumbnails of themes for that tag.
Here’s are a few themes that I saw there that I thought were pretty nice:
Posted in Themes | Tags: inspiration | 1 Comment »
Monday, September 10th, 2007
Blogging seems to be all about content. It’s about what you write, how you write it, who you link to, etc. So how does design come into play? Most people say that design is important, and that you should have a professional design that is easy on the eyes, and simple to navigate. It is generally agreed that a bad blog design may have a negative impact on your blog readership.
But I’ve rarely heard people say that a fantastic blog design will be the key to blogging success. Well, Blogsolid is a good case study of how a unique and beautiful design can bring in torrents of readers.
Blogsolid officially launched on July 31st. The content on the site is pretty good, but not anything out of the ordinary. By August 9, the blog was picked up by a bunch of web design galleries. The onslaught of visitors crashed the poor guy’s servers for 12 hours.
Blogsolid’s design and architecture are brilliant. The blog has three categories, which appear on the home page as options for entering the blog. You can also enter the general blog by clicking on the header (this should probably be made clearer somehow - I think there should be four options for entering the blog, i.e. the three categories plus the blog with everything).
Of course, the guy/gal behind Blogsolid is a graphic designer, and it shows. As we’re not all graphic designers, we can theoretically pay someone for a unique design. However, blogging is not always the most profitable of activities, so this is often not viable. But this case study just goes to show how significant design can be in the success of your blog. So try to make sure your blog is presentable and professional, either by creating your own design, or carefully selecting and customizing an existing theme.
(I am working on customizing a new theme for WordPressGarage as we speak - even I can’t stand the way this blog looks anymore!)
Posted in Design | Tags: blogging, inspiration | 8 Comments »
