New site: Lovely Blogs
I’ve been working all week on a new site called Lovely Blogs. Yes, it’s another design show case. No, it’s not the same as all the others. Okay, it’s basically the same. But I am focusing on blogs, not sites designed with CSS.
The reason I decided to create this site stems from the fact that the majority of my client work revolves around blog design. I spend a lot of time looking at blogs and coming up with new ideas and thinking about why people did it “this way” or “that way.” So why not list all the blogs in one spot? That’s what I did - and I am going to continue to do.
I’ve added a bit of content, about 10 blogs and 2 posts. I am going to start looking for a small group of people that owuld be willing to contribute to the blog once or twice a week each. I am going to keep pumping out new blogs and hopefully it will all start to catch on.
The design and architecture
The design of this site was actually something that took very little time. I had the logo banged out in Photoshop about 15 minutes after registering the domain. The color scheme has gotten a few compliments, but in reality I just kind of slapped it together. I told David that maybe the trick is to think less.
I decided to approach this site with the same way I approached the recent redesign of Steve’s website - thinking about details. I tried as hard as I could to not overlook anything. I customized the colors of the voting plugin, I worked (relatively) hard to get spacing correct, etc.
I decided to use the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin to manage the post tags (normally I just use WordPress categories) and use the WordPress categories to manage the way the information is displayed. For example, when a new gallery item is posted I can put it into the “blog” category and tag it with as many tags as I want without messing up the way the information is displayed on the site. People that use Moveable Type are pretty familiar with this, but for people with WordPress it might be a new idea.
I added the Ajax voting script, as I mentioned above. It was a pretty simple plug in to install and took a bit of CSS and image customization but it was working very well right out of the box. It’s called “WP-Rateposts.” I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a way to let users rate your posts.
The design still isn’t working perfectly in every browser and that’s okay, I didn’t expect it to. Over time I will work out other bugs and all of that. But for now, it’s functional in most browsers and looks good in modern browsers.
Check it out
Go ahead and check it out, let me know if there are any major problems and I’ll try to get them fixed. If you have a blog and want to submit it, go for it. I am only posting blogs I think look “cool” but I’ll definitely look at every blog submitted.
Bonus: I am running advertisements on the site and since I have no traffic stats to speak of, I am running the advertising spots for free until I get some paying advertisers. If you’re interested, get ahold of me.
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Its a good idea but if you want to get people intrested (I imagine they are the blog savy) you will need to show them blogs they havn’t seen. The ones you have launched with are great designs but they are are already popular.