I have been planning to redesign my blogs and always this is the first question which comes to my mind and i felt its better to ask the blog readers on what kind of website designs they love and what is the structure that would make them read blogs regularly. Most blogs have different kind of styles, templates, looks and ideas and iam going to differentiate them into a few in order to get a better idea.
Simple Blog Designs : These are the designs where you would find a blog with the lowest graphics but main focus given to the blogs content. A Minimalistic design with neat sidebar, header and footer. A simple logo on the top with a small advertisement in the header and a sidebar consisting of few latest posts and subscription options. These kind of designs may have 2 or 3 columns based on the themes width but overall would be really quick loading with the lowest use of graphics and more use of simplicity.
Magazine Style Blog Designs : These designs would be normally found on newspaper kind of websites and blogs where atleast 25 posts are shown on the homepage on multiple columns and while you are on a single posts section you would find that the pages are stuffed with links and links all over the place. If a blog is having a big number of subscribers then magazine themes would suit them but again these are filled with stuff like related posts, related categories, twitter updates, most recent posts, most popular posts, monthly archieve and so on making the whole blog look like a complete magazine filled with everything.
Its generally upto you on what kind of design you would like, but iam making a small poll on what kind of design you would prefer reading. Whats your take on Simple Vs Magazine Style blog designs. Currently this blogs homepage is more towards a magazine look because it covers everything from the header to the footer and most of the blogs area is filled except the sidebar. Just check out our article on the best designed blogs in order to find some really well designed blogs and let me know what kind of designs would you recommend me.
Great that you took the initiative of the theme change. Still I would prefer Magazine style as you write on variety of contents.
Moreover it would be amazing to see more homepage content with 2 column sidebar. So my bet would be on Magazine style theme. Keep us updated 😉
My preference will always be 2 Column simple theme, i feel magazine themes are not good for Blogs and best suited only for news like websites. even Mashable, Techcruch, Lifehacker, Labnol have two column theme at core and modified to suite there needs.
Yes of course 2 Columns rocks! It looks clean and more professional!
I would prefer a simple theme always. Magazine themes can’t be adjusted into minds of basic readers always. 3 column-themes are always the best to display many things in the sidebars, and the content too!
2-column themes limit your page with only few things in the sidebar!
So my choice would be 3-column theme, simple one.
I would go with 2 column simple design. The simplicity also results in fast loading and most of the internet users in India are still on slow internet connections and a simple design would be favorable for every internet user. I love a simple 2 column (sidebar at right) design which has a fixed width of say 950 to 1000px. If you go for a floating width, readers on widescreen monitors find it difficult to read the content.
In my opinion, current theme looks good, but its spread all over the internet 😉
The problem is many bloggers are using a illegal version of the same theme, which is why i feel something unique would be more better now.
I always like magazine style look mate…
it have lot of features in it…