In The Beginning Stages Of A Custom Redesign
05.22.07

In The Beginning Stages Of A Custom Redesign

I’ve made the decision to do a custom design for my personal blog. This is instead of using a modified template that’s out there for anybody to use. I’ve started to sketch out some of the ideas I’ve been thinking about, and have begun laying the beginnings out in Photoshop. I should [...]

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In The Beginning Stages Of A Custom Redesign

I’ve made the decision to do a custom design for my personal blog. This is instead of using a modified template that’s out there for anybody to use. I’ve started to sketch out some of the ideas I’ve been thinking about, and have begun laying the beginnings out in Photoshop. I should have a Photoshop prototype in the near future that I’ll share with you guys before getting into the gritty coding (which I don’t want to do!).

Hopefully you guys will give me some good feedback so I better the design before actually finalizing it.

Why Do A Custom Design?

There are two main reasons for me to make a custom design from scratch:

  1. Branding. I love branding. I love to take a brand and tie all of its marketing aspects into one identifiable project. I love when people want to wear apparel promoting and representing your brand. Having a customized design differentiates you from all of the other sites that are using templates that many others are using. By having a clean, professional look, you can also give the perception that your blog is a lot bigger than it really is. This can help generate more readers, on top of signing up new/more advertisers.
  2. Promotion. One of my businesses, Tri Megatech, offers web design as one of our core services. I will promote the new design of our blog as a Tri Megatech design, and this will hopefully bring new clients our way (as long as the design looks good and has a good UI)

I’m worried about doing some of the integration into Wordpress, as I don’t know Wordpress code, and never really played around with it (nor am I a programmer by any means). I hope to be able to utilize other templates to see how they pull in data in order to develop the design for my blog. I may even outsource the coding aspect of the design to somebody else (any references/recommendations?).

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  1. Ryan Christensen

    05/22/2007 3:31 pm

    Can’t wait to see what you come up with! I’ve really enjoyed reading your blog since re-discovering you (we actually talked years ago during the SL heydays… at one point I was going to help that small team re-write (or rather, write) a new back-end for the site.)

    I’ve worked pretty extensively in WP, so I’m happy to help out how I can. Fire me an email any time…

  2. David Pitlyuk

    05/22/2007 3:35 pm

    Hey Ryan - I knew you sounded familiar :) Glad you put that connection back in my mind!

    I’ll definitely be in touch, from the little research I’ve done, it sounds like it may be best to base everything off a pre-existing framework (ex: Cutline)…but we’ll see how things progress. First things first is making the design :)

    Thanks for the offer to help, and stay tuned! Once I get on a roll, I normally hate stopping.

  3. Ryan Christensen

    05/22/2007 3:44 pm

    Yes.. starting from a base theme (Cutline is a great foundation… Chris Pearson did a great job putting it together) really simplify things.

    I’m actually working on my own “base” templates (and a corresponding WP theme) that I can base future projects on, as a large portion of my sites share a very common structure at their base.

  4. Brandon Hopkins

    05/22/2007 6:41 pm

    If you want to do it on your own, definitely start with a framework (cutline is great!) and go up from there…once you have the code down, you’ll still want to work from an existing template…getting the base code down is really time consuming.

    If you need someone, I work with a guy who is a great developer. It will cost you about $200 but he is the best. I can’t give you his name yet because I have two more projects for him when he finishes my current project!

  5. David Pitlyuk

    05/22/2007 7:49 pm

    So is Cutline really the go to template for framework? Or are there others that are better out there? I’ll keep your developer in mind, based on what I’m working on so far..it actually doesn’t even seem like it would be too hard to take this template and modify, but my CSS isn’t 110% (I hate dealing with all the inter-browser bugs and what not).

    Thanks for the tips guys!

  6. Brandon Hopkins

    05/23/2007 1:51 pm

    Cutline is definitely the best framework. It every very lightweight, supported, and isn’t graphic intense. It makes for a great starting point. I have it running unmodded on one of my sites http://www.Vooed.com

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