Blog Design Help

[rjani]

Hi everyone!

I've spent the last few days setting up my new blog, and I struggled a lot with the design, and this morning when my brother said it's like "grandpa-style", I knew I need some help.
So I taught maybe you can help me. I'm mostly interested in your thoughts of the site's colors, but I welcome any suggestions about ad placement, or what's really disgusting on the page.
thanks for your help!

here is the blog: Blog

[sidsavara]

I think until you have more content it will be hard to judge, but I think it does look professional and clean. I think you have way too many ad units personally, and the moving units are kind of tacky, but that's just my take on it. I wouldn't put up any ads until you have at least 1K visitors a day - until that point they basically won't make you any money anyway, and it'll just turn people off from visiting and linking to you.

[rjani]

Thanks very much for your opinion. I don't worry about the ads, cause when I put up more content it won't seem that crowded and the site is still incomplete, and I plan on adding other widgets to the sidebar soon.

But what you said about he design, well, it really confuses me. I've just received an email from a friend, I asked him the same question and he said it's dull. I also don't like it very much, so I'll probably change it, but I couldn't find any ready wordpress theme that fits my needs so far

[sidsavara]

It is all dependent on your perspective. My design is also along the same lines are yours in some respects - showcases content, not flash etc. I call it clean. Others may call it dull . I use thumbnail images to liven up my articles, but the point of the blog is for my writing.

Like I said, write a few articels first, and then it'll be easier to get feedback. Every website without articles looks dull. The point of a blog is to have blog entries, not to have some whizbang header.

[rjani]

Well said, thanks. I'm also a content-freak maybe that's why I wanted to put an end to this design-thing. Now I see it's not that easy. I've also changed my theme since then, and I think I've learned a lot from this whole thing. Well, at least I have an idea for my next post

[htgerman]

Originally Posted by rjani

Hi everyone!

I've spent the last few days setting up my new blog, and I struggled a lot with the design, and this morning when my brother said it's like "grandpa-style", I knew I need some help.
So I taught maybe you can help me. I'm mostly interested in your thoughts of the site's colors, but I welcome any suggestions about ad placement, or what's really disgusting on the page.
thanks for your help!

here is the blog: Blog

I just found your post and had a look at your blog. What I like most about it is the content. Got stuck reading when I actually wanted to look at the design. The colour scheme isn't exactly my taste, the brown does remind me a bit of mum's craft blog :-) but well, as I said, that's just my personal taste. I also agree with sidsavara about the image ad blogs. But colour scheme aside I'll be back to check out new posts!

[Gaz]

Just a few quick things I noticed on first glance. First a little information. I'm running a 1280 by 800 resolution, so not too big.

The first thing I don't like about the layout is that the ads appeared centred on my page with the content all the way over on the left. This makes it feel like the content is an afterthought and the ads are the primary concern. Secondly, the Title of the blog is on the right, so I automatically looked below that for the content and was met with a blank space. You could try centering the content and ads so that the page feels a little more balanced.

If you don't want to move the columns, simply shifting the title to the right hand side of the screen should make a big difference.

The other thing I noticed is that the Title seems to blend into the heading bar. Try changing it to match the background colour or some other light colour that fits your theme. If you want to match the colours exactly, there's a nifty little programme called colour picker.

Otherwise, the content looks good, and good content will always overshadow bad design in the long run.

[rjani]

Wow, thanks a lot guys, I'm very happy you found the content good

Gaz, this is the most detailed info I got so far, thank you very much.

The fact is, I have to re-create almost the whole design I think.

But you're completely right. I should use dynamic columns maybe rather than fixed width for the columns. The blank space is due to ViralblogAds. I put it there to coveer the blank space but it doesn't work correctly
I also wanted to change the title, but haven't got time...
I'll make sure I change all these mistakes during the next week.

Thanks again!