I’ve been conflicted about my blog appearance for some time now. While I played around with its appearance quite a bit jumping from theme to theme and look to look, there was one standard thing I never messed with and that’s the basic blog structure, as in latest posts (in full) on top, followed by earlier, and so on.
Even after going self-hosted last year, I stuck to my safe zone. But now the time has come I think for a drastic makeover. Last week, I said buh-bye to my old look and started experimenting with different ways of structuring my stuff.
And so here’s my new magazine style layout. It’s still a bit rough in places and I am still tweaking a lot of stuff on the back-end to get my blog to look just perfect, but for now, I am loving the way I am able to display a variety of posts on the front page. I also love how I am able to showcase photo posts in a much more attractive gallery-style way. See my posts about Napa and Goa to get what I mean 🙂 .
Now, I am forced to take good photographs to justify this style of presentation on the blog.
What do you think of the new look? Do you prefer excerpts or posts in a blog home page?
I think the magazine layout is really chic.
thanks 🙂 @wantonruminating:disqus
Love the new design. Beautiful!
Where are you hosting now? I have been thinking about it and I am going to start a new blog.
@reemasahay:disqus Thanks so much, Reema. I went for bluehost.com’s hosting services. I believe GoDaddy is also good. At that time, bluehost had some offer on so I went with them and I am pretty happy with it so far.
Nish, your new blog layout is absolutely fantastic! I love the clean lines, the minimalistic layout and the sidebars as well! I especially love the latest book reviews section in the right sidebar. What a fantastic way to show your ratings!
@fiveeyedbookworm:disqus Praise coming from you is high praise indeed! I love your blog layout and style. Thanks!
Huh! I can’t bluddy find your blog posts!!! Humph!
@Ana I don’t understand, there are excerpts on the main page, you just click on them to see the complete post. Once you get to a post page, there are previous and later buttons to navigate from post to post.
Can you show me what you are seeing? post a screen grab maybe?
I like it! I’m not any sort of visual design expert, but I think you’ve made it look really nice!
Thanks @Jenny @ Reading the End I think I am mostly done with all the layout changes, some of my older posts still need a little tweaking but I am not going to bother unless I see they are getting a lot of hits
Wow, really nice and modern! I love it!
Thanks @JudithLeeswammes:disqus 🙂
This new look is amazing Nish. It looks so professional now. I am loving it.
Thanks @avada@ashcerebrations.com I love it too. I hope I stay in love with it long enough to justify the work I put into customizing it to look the way I want 😀
Question: how was the page loading? faster/slower?
It was fast enough I feel.
@Avada@ashcerebrations.com cool, now that the blog is self-hosted, I really wonder about stuff like page loading and all.
I think a good magazine layout can be amazing (LOVE yours btw) but you really need enough good pictures to make it work otherwise it makes your blog look scattered and unorganized. Also, it depends on the nature of your blog – a food blog / review blog / photo heavy blog would do well with magazine styles but a personal blog / blog heavy on the writing it probably isn’t necessary.
@disqus_EvwuDmEW9X:disqus that’s true. I am seeing my older posts where I didn’t focus on images look very average. Mine is a review blog for the most part so I am hoping that I can make this layout work. It’s more work maintaining than a regular blog layout.