Editor Note: Thanks for the few emails concerning my not feeling well. Just a nasty headache was all. Back in the saddle fully today.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
The Cleaner The Better
I am not good with drawing or painting. I am above average when it comes to graphic design, but not a professional by any means. Often times in the past I have tried to over compensate my sites with flashy headers and colors. Let me tell you from experience, the cleaner the site, the more professional it looks. If you are not good at design, stick to the more basic looking Wordpress themes like the Arthemia or any other magazine type theme. If you are working with BANS, the free template in the new BANS guide is excellent as well. Any of these templates can easily have the colors changed and a nice clean small logo at the top will suffice. Make sure your logo is professional looking as well, it helps establish the brand. A great free program I have mentioned before, is Xheader. You can find free tutorials on using it all over the web. Just start with Youtube to be exact. Your content on site will lend the most credibility to your site, not a flashy logo. It is all too common to want to over design a site. When in doubt the more white space the better and two to three colors are plenty. Look at the website for Target, nice and clean. This blog is testament as well. Every template change has made this ordinary blogger blog look better and more professional. It continues to rise in traffic and earnings as well. The look is not the only reason mind you, but it sure does not hurt.
Editor Note: Thanks for the few emails concerning my not feeling well. Just a nasty headache was all. Back in the saddle fully today.
Editor Note: Thanks for the few emails concerning my not feeling well. Just a nasty headache was all. Back in the saddle fully today.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Very good advice. I tried Gimp.org and became suicidal. My time is better spent on content.
Find a picture related to your product and put it in the header.
Your advertsing Soggy, and I'm discovering mine as well, looks better on a white background, especially if you're using color imaging. They stand out and invite clicks.
On my commercial site I used a pale yellow but it works well with my design.
Arthemia works well with SEO, content on left, links to right for niche sites.
Dave, do you use Arthemia yourself? I just installed it and I'm having a problem with the header. I created my header in Xheader. I believe its the right size, but when I upload it to the theme it appears very small. Any insight into why that's happening? Thanks.
@Justin Look in the header.php file and you will see where you can adust the image width and height to match your image size. Let me know if that solves it.
Dave
Post a Comment