I’m a newbie when it comes to Blog Designs, or should I say to designs in general? I can’t do anything but a bit of html on our themes and work around some WordPress codes, but who cares? My friend and I have gathered here at my house to discuss a few points about Blog Designs in general.

The first thing that came to my mind was questioning him, what he would prefer, paid, sponsored or free^GPL themes? And he answered straight back that he is in favor of Free Themes.

In WordPress Designs, or Blog Designs, rather; it doesn’t really matter what you offer your readers in terms of blog design, it’s still the content that counts, but having a blog design that suits the eyes of your readers and the niche of your blog is a great bonus, including strategic placement for advertisement. But who cares?

I have been left unsatisfactory a couple of times, the Revolution Theme and Revolution Two Series which gave me an headache in terms of getting the theme edited and the RevolutionPRO Media specifically in terms of server load caused because of all the customization that I applied. During these times, the quality of my posts has declined, and hey, it has really affected my blogging, but who cares?

I asked my friend a second question, letting him choose one of the given, who is mostly affected by the design that you have? You or your readers and he answered me back, “since you are the head writer and administering the blog, you know the right answer to that.”

I had to reflect for a moment and began to understand what he meant, blog designs are not just about blog designs, but are the mere cover of your writings, in some way they reflect the person behind the scene who is writing and affects both the reader and the writer. I don’t think that there’s someone who would like to read a blog with a totally messed up design, nor do I believe that there is someone writing on such blog, and we are lucky that there are a lot of Free WordPress Themes available on the net, of which most are GPL, thus open source. Additionally, there might be someone who would still read that blog if it contains great content, but do you think that someone likes to write on it? But who cares. He keeps on saying.

Who cares, who cares, who cares.

It’s not about the functionality of the design, it’s about what’s behind the visual, the code that bonds everything together. It should be clean, and not a mess; “I’d rather have a minimalist theme that is Search Engine Friendly, rather than having a totally cool design with a messy code”.

I finally understood and came to know who is the one that really cares and that are the search engines.

When creating a blog design, you should have all three aspects in mind, what the

• blogger might find useful
• what the readers may find attractive and
• what the search engines can call friendly.

With these three tings in mind, a blog design, whether simple or functional is always a big favorite in the crowd.

The third question that I asked him is: What makes Open Source Themes so special?

It’s the code that’s behind the scene, the stuff that you can edit, the unlimited hacks that you can apply, you know, I know, we know that there’s none who wants his work to be ripped off or edited, but ones something goes open source, your options can go beyond imagination, just like WordPress has been lifted up to a enormous high state already.

Lastly, I asked him if what would suit this blog best and he answered

“A custom theme”, said he. “A theme that you and our readers would discuss about first. It doesn’t need to be too functional, it should be able to have a few options to emphasize some posts and have a nice placement for the advertisements and we are good to go. We don’t need need a Magazine Template, a Blog Template will do. After all, once you’ve got the final output of your readers and personal point of view, we’ll know how effective a theme is alongside with the good content in terms of Search Engine effectiveness.”

And this has been a newbie talk between Joseph Quin, yours truly, and Kevin Paquet, discussion Blog Designs. We hope that other blog owners and designers were able to get some information out of this post and can apply them to their (free) themes in future.

This post is a contest entry of Blog Design Contest, hosted by Blog Design Studio and the winner will get a free custom wordpress theme. There are some amazing prizes by Daily Blog Tips and Blogging Tips as well.