Blog Basics

Designing your blog

Much of your blog's design will depend on the blog service you choose to host it. It's difficult to plan the appearance of your blog in too much detail before you've actually signed up with a blog service. However, there are a few components of your blog's design that you can decide on ahead of time.

Blog name

Your blog name is important because it's the first thing people will see about your blog. There's no single rule or formula for coming up with a good blog name, but these tips can help:

• Make it relate to your topic.
  This can help you attract readers who are looking to read about a specific subject.
• Make it interesting.
  "Craig's Cooking Blog" is a descriptive title, but it doesn't really make you want to read it. Think of the blogs you read. Which ones have names that sound interesting to you? What do these names have in common?
• Make it easy to remember.
  The best way to do this is to make it short—three or four words at the most. If you choose to use a made-up word for your blog's title, make it even shorter, and be sure it resembles or contains a real word. Engadget and Gizmodo are two examples of blogs with made-up but memorable titles.
• Make it something that can work as a logo.
  One way to test this is to visit Wordmark.it, a site that lets you preview any word in every font you have installed on your computer. While you'll probably want your final logo to include some color or other graphic design elements, this can be a good way to test out your title.
  Testing a logo with Wordmark.it

Design elements

As mentioned above, you'll get to customize the appearance of your blog when you create it with a blog service. Most major blog services offer various themes, or templates, you can use to select the layout of your blog. Once you choose a template, you can further customize its appearance by choosing a new color scheme and organizing your posts into categories.

Making choices about your blog's appearance will be easier if you already have an idea about how you want your blog to look. Look at blogs that you find visually appealing. Ideally, these blogs should also have similar subject matter to your own—after all, a design that works for a political blog may look strange on a photoblog. However, this isn't essential. You can use any blogs you like as design inspiration.

Once you've found blogs whose design you like, the next step is to figure out what they have in common. You can then use those design elements in your own blog.

For an example of this process, review Elena's design inspirations in the graphic below.

Getting design ideas from other blogs