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HOW TO DESIGN BLOG |
Designing a blog is a great way for anyone new to web design to get their feet wet, but for more experienced designers it's also a good exercise in working with constraints. The elements that make a good blog are the same elements that make a good, useable web page. If you do add more pages, or if you're working with archives enabled on your blog, you'll need to implement an easy-to-understand navigation system for your readers. A simple way to add navigation is to create a set of links inside a module. Put the module in a prominent location on every page—the blog, of course, but also the archive index page and any other pages you choose to build.
Keeping navigation links constant on every page is important; otherwise, users might become disoriented. However, it's best to unlink the name of the page the user is reading—this lets your readers know which page they are currently viewing.
When you break the blog into elements, like header, body copy, links, miscellaneous modules, and navigational elements, you are beginning to think like an information architect. Like many bloggers, you might eventually want to create more pages for essays or photos while you keep your blog as the home page of this new contentheavy web site. The streamlined, elemental thinking you've developed with your blog will translate well to future pages you might want to add. And if you decide to power your whole site with a blog-style content management system, you will already have the skills to make it so.
Blogs are all about content, and this content is very often text. It's important for a blog to have a clean, readable type design yet still remain interesting and engaging. Back in the day when HTML was just a baby, your only font choice was whatever font the browser default displayed. Today's transitional HTML is a little more advanced with its font element and attributes, but for superior type control on the web, cascading style sheets (CSS) is the way to go.
Note that although style sheets provide a much wider number of design solutions, they also bring baggage to the situation—they aren't always supported by not-so-new browsers. Also, fonts specified in CSS must be native to the user's computer for them to appear.