Getting ready
A blog's theme is a very important component of a blog's identity. While we may hope that people will judge our blogs and our writing simply on the merits of our ideas, presentation and perception are vitally important. A blog's theme is one of the things that make each blog unique. The theme is the style—what fonts are used, how objects are situated on a page, what color scheme is applied, and so on. A theme is like a coat of paint. Anytime you want to change the way your blog looks, you can metaphorically add a new coat of paint. Edublogs makes it easy to do this. You just choose one of their themes, and it is instantly applied to your blog.
The following screenshot shows the default theme that Edublogs supplies, called Edublogs Default:
The following is an annotated version of the same screenshot, showing the different pages of the page that a theme can change the style of:
As a web designer and theme developer, there are several questions I always ask clients when we are in the preliminary stages of creating a custom theme.
- What colors or color scheme do you like?
- Are they easy on the eyes? Do they make it is easier to read or are the colors abrasive?
- Do you have a picture in mind that could work as a header image? (The header is the picture and/or text at the very top of the blog. It generally does not change from page to page.)
- What message are you trying to convey with your blog? How does the theme help to convey the central message of your blog? Should it be serious and professional, whimsical and playful, and so on?
- Do you prefer serif fonts (serif fonts have small lines at the end of letters, such as Times New Roman) or sans-serif fonts (such as Arial)?
- Is the format of your blog going to be mostly text, pictures, video, audio, or a mix?
- Do you want to have one or more sidebars? A sidebar is a narrow column to the left or right of the center column where you're content goes. Generally, this is used to display content you are trying to promote, such as posts, links, other blogs, advertisements, and so on. Most blogs have at least one sidebar.
The idea is to get inspiration from other blogs. There is a multitude of blogs available on the Internet on many different subjects. In addition to just looking at the different themes that blogs use, try to get a sense of how their theme interacts with their content.