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In this part of our Building a Website in Progressive Steps series we’re going to discuss putting a single blog page together, and go over the various elements within the page while pointing out the importance of each. So let’s dig into the tutorial and start talking setting up a blog page!

Step 5: Blog Page

Webdesigntuts+

http://www.haluko.com/

I’m a multidisciplinary designer for digital platforms.
My name is RJay Haluko. I have 12 years experience, and currently work as the Creative Director for a digital agency based in Princeton, NJ. My passion is at the intersection of art and technology

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Web design. Oferim servicii de web design, site-uri web, email marketing, eCommerce, web design, newsletter, cms, seo, webdesign, website.

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Navigation is one of the most important aspects of designing for any website, but the challenges associated are more sensitive for a blog or any content heavy site. Some designers take it as a mechanical task and they design the navigation accordingly. However, in my opinion, navigation is as much an art as it is a science, and designers need not limit themselves to default solutions.

The Mission of Blog Navigation

The ultimate mission of any website’s navigation design is to effectively guide readers around the site so that their needs are met. That is why navigation is understood to be the most critical aspect of usability to any type of website.

Designing an effective navigation system for a blog is an especially sensitive matter… owing to the fact that content that is continually being added, increasing the complexity of navigation with each new post.

This is where the mission of blog navigation begins to take on a little more complexity than a general definition. In a blog, the key design goals are as follows:

• Users shouldn’t miss out on anything new or special.
• Users should quickly understand what content is available.
• Users should know how to find the content that they are seeking (if they are on a mission to find something specific).
• Once that content is found, users should be able to find more content that interests them.

This presents some additional challenges for a designer because so much of these scenarios happen after the design is complete. Fortunately, there are a wide variety of “design paradigms” at your disposal to address these challenges to prepare your blog designs for usability success.

To put it simply: the easiest way to make an ideal navigation for your blog is not to leave any surprises for the reader and to put things where they would expect them to be found. Just what this means will be a little different for every project, but we’ll identify some key strategies below. In all of the tips that we’ll be examining, I want you to remember one principle:

The goal for any blog’s navigation system is that the main navigation elements stay the same, even when content changes on a daily basis.

With that in mind, let’s dive in!

The Challenges of Designing Blog Navigation

What follows are some of the fundamental challenges associated with blog navigation, and ways to address them with simple design and content strategies.

Once a blog hits about 40 posts, it becomes unrealistic to expect readers to keep hitting the “More Articles” button as their primary form of navigation. Once a blog hits 100 posts, it’s just plain cruel.

Our goal here is to help you to identify the type of problem withing your design’s navigation… once we’ve done that, solving the problems is actually pretty easy:

Challenge 01: Finding Old Content

When you start a blog, navigating content seems easy… it’s often not until you have several months (or years) worth of content that this challenge begins to show it’s ugly face. As the blog grows further and you keep adding content on weekly basis, finding these older posts becomes harder for readers.

With the blog growing and new content continuously being added to it, there is a great percentage of the visitors who will miss out on some of the best content you have posted on your blog. This is bad for two reasons:

1. Reader’s are missing out on great content that you have to offer.
2. You (or your client) is missing out on traffic from the older posts.

I have seen many blogs which were full of all sorts of interesting stuff; However, when I tried to dig the content deeper to check out the older posts, I was left with no choice but to browse it page by page and hope that I stumble upon a great article. And so, I realized the importance of making the older content findable.

Solution: Design Usable Archives

My suggestion for dealing with the challenge of finding older posts is to integrate archival content into your design. Any WordPress user can include a simple “monthly archives” widget… but in my opinion those monthly archives are silly and archaic.

If a reader can’t find an article using the “Search” tool, what makes you think a monthly index is going to help? It’s not!

My advice is to follow two principles:

1. Categorize and tag your content properly (we’ll cover this in a minute)
2. Use a search system that actually works (for people who know exactly what they are looking for).
3. Integrate smarter types of archival content than simple monthly archives.

This can be easily achieved with including the ‘Popular Posts’ panel on your blog. While there really isn’t any harm in opting for archiving and older post plugins, using a manually created list of Popular Posts in the sidebar is the best way to deal with this challenge. This will enable the blogger to highlight older content according to his own choice (and analytics), rather than forcing readers to guess whether or not May 2007 was a good month for articles.

Apart from Popular Posts tip, some other ways to improve older posts navigation are Internal Links and Contextual Links to cater to those visitors who are reading a post and would be interested in related information that the blog has covered in the past. We’ll cover this a bit more in the section on “Related Posts”.

Challenge 02: Category Chaos

Categories are another important aspect of your blog’s navigation. They are useful for organizing the content and to simplify the user experience of your blog. Consider your blog as a complete business set up where the Categories are the cabinets or file folders where the whole data is kept and organized. The sole purpose of the Categories is to organize; however, if the Categories are not organized themselves, then the navigation will become chaotic and confusing.

When addressing the navigation of your blog, take a look at your category list and ask yourself 2 questions:

1. How many main categories are there? (more than a handful can become confusing)
2. Can you easily understand what the site is about from the category listing? (ie: Coffee Beans, Coffee Makers, Coffee Reviews, and Coffee Philosophy – you can guess this is a blog about coffee.)
3. Are the categories relevant and useful for finding content? (or are they just taking up space?)

The underlying issue is one that designers should be aware of, even it it’s someone else’s blog you’re designing: Useless categories create confusion. This not only makes the blog look busy and cluttered but also leaves the visitor confused and disappointed if they open up a category only to find .

The Solution: Design Categories for Usability

To address this issue, my suggestion is to make the category list more relevant, simple and user-friendly. You can start off by removing a few specific categories from the list that either have very few posts or aren’t that relevant to the subject matter. This way the shorter list of categories will be a bit easier to digest.

It’s important for the categories to be intuitive and understandable. When you are initially making the categories on your blog, put yourself in the reader’s shoes and make it as obvious as possible. It is equally important to strike a balance between creating categories that are too specific and too broad, so the reader may not get confused with too little or too much content in the categories section.

Bonus tip: Creating categories based on Search Engine Optimization is another way of doing it right. Using some of your blog’s most popular keywords in your category titles can help boost your search engine results.

Challenge 03: Encouraging Visitors to Keep Reading

At one point of time, reading a blog was a very “active” process – a reader would need to navigate the content to find what he wanted. That’s fine in theory, but it can result in high “bounce rates”, where readers will leave your site the instant they find what they were looking for.

The Solution: Bring Relevant Content Forward

This is one area of blog design that, thankfully, has improved dramatically over the past year. Thanks to a variety of new plugins (available for everything from WordPress to Expression Engine), there are countless pre-built tools to bring relevant content to users on the very same posts that they are interested in.

Many blogs have started using plugins to include a list of Related Posts at the end of each post. The Related Posts plugins are meant to smooth out the internal navigation of the blog by guiding readers to relevant content… but we can still improve on them by manually setting the “related posts” rather than letting the plugin set them for us.

Manually curating posts as “Popular Posts” is a great way to help readers find interesting content.

Call it what you want: Related Posts, Popular Posts, Relevant Articles, etc., but they all come down to achieving one thing: helping users find content that’s proven to be interesting to them. It’s funny, but something as simple as saying, “If you enjoyed this article, you would also be interested to read…”, can encourage visitors to actually move around a site rather than leaving the moment they find what they thought they wanted. If you customize the Related Posts list yourself and manage it according to visitor’s trends, it can prove to be far more successful than automated plugins.

To Conclude…

I’ll conclude by emphasizing the importance of navigation for your blog. The challenges we just reviewed aren’t rocket science, but it’s amazing how a few simple changes to a blog’s navigation design can dramatically improve the user’s experience on a blog (or any other heavy content site).

Just look at Amazon.com for example – part of their success has been as a result of their “customers who bought this product also bought this:” widget (shown below)

Amazon.com does a great job at driving visitors to products that interest them through simple strategies.

This addition to their site seems so simple on the face, but consider how many times you’ve clicked those “related products” yourself. Sure, Amazon.com isn’t a blog – but it makes for a great example of how using simple design and content strategies can improve usability and the overall user experience.

A large number of blogs rely far too much on the wealth of information in their archives… most of which never finds the visitor’s eyes. If you address the aforementioned issues according to the suggested tips, you will be able to maintain a good level of blog efficiency and usability, making its navigation ideal of your visitors.

Webdesigntuts+

http://www.moovents.com/

Servizi di SEO, SEM, Web Marketing, Social Media Marketing ed Event management per costruire la reputazione online della tua azienda

http://meme.yahoo.com/home/

Try blogging with Meme, the smartest and simplest posting experience. Create beautiful posts, no skills required.

http://www.fedosejev.lt/beta/index.html

Tomas Fedosejev online portfolio and blog

In this tutorial you will learn how simple, straight forward design techniques can create a clean community blog theme in Adobe Photoshop. A few techniques discussed in this tutorial include the use of proper spacing, typography, colors and visual hierarchy — a few essential tools in a successful designer’s toolbox. Let’s get started!

About the Design

Today we’ll be looking at the design for Alex Pascal’s “Revolution Magazine” theme for WordPress. The fully coded version is available on ThemeForest as a WordPress blog theme.

Revolution Magazine is clean, modern, premium WordPress magazine, which also doubles as a community blog, personal blog, or whatever you shall use it for. If you have been looking for the spark to ignite your plain old blog into a popular magazine, you have found it.

It all starts with the design though, and Alex is going to walk us through how he approached the design phase of this project. As this is just a design tutorial, he won’t be going into the theme-coding, but remember that you can check out the Revolution theme at ThemeForest to see a live example. There are also a bunch of great WordPress Theme coding tuts over at Nettuts (like this one). We hope you like it – let’s dig in!

Step 1

Go to File > New > then set the height to about 2000px, the width to 1400px, and the resolution to 72dpi.

We also need to make sure that our Rulers and Guides are viewed. So, we’ll go to View > Extras / Rulers / Snap (so that our objects snap in alignment with our Guides).

We now need to set up some quick guide lines to use later on in the design. Go to View > New Guide… > Check “Vertical” and type in the following values, pressing “OK” after each one to insert it. We want guide lines at 220px, 250px, 380px, 420px, 830px, 860px, 880px, 1155px, and 1180px.

Now let’s fill our background with a solid color. Select the layer “Background,” right-click on it, and choose “Layer from background” and give it a name. Now, using the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M), create a selection over the whole canvas and fill the selection with #d0d0d0.

Step 2

We will now create a header background. Create a new layer and call it “header”, then grab your Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) and make a selection at the top of your canvas spanning 175px high and fully across the canvas and fill it with any color. Double click on the layer you have just created and click on “Gradient Overlay” > existing gradient image > then set the right-most color to #383838. Position the left color at about 60% and change the color to #2D2D2D.

Now go ahead and duplicate the “header” layer and move it directly under the first header. Double click the layer once again and go to “Gradient Overlay” > existing gradient image > then set the right-most color to #e0e0e0. Position the left color at about 50% and change the color to #d0d0d0.

Now click on “Inner Shadow” and change the color to #EEEEEE, the opacity to 100%, distance to 1px, choke to 100% and size to 0px. Change the angle to 90 degrees and uncheck “Global Lighting” as we will be using different light angles throughout the theme.

Now that we have the background all ready to go, let’s make a logo for our site! Create a new layer, about 40px from the top and ligned up with the first guide line, using the Horizontal Type Tool (T), type the name of your site in your preferred font (demo images display Helvetica Neue LT Std but regular Helvetica or Arial works just fine). Proceed to changing the Layer Styles as displayed in the example below.

This is what your header should be looking like so far.

Step 3

A web site is nothing without a navigation, and a good one at that! Let’s now create a navigation bar that blends in with our existing header background.

Navigation

Create a new layer and call it “Vertical Gradient” and grab the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) and make a 960px by 40px selection 115px from the top of the canvas, leaving about 20px underneath the selection for the background and fill it with any color. You can then add the Layer Styles shown in the image below to the layer you have just created.

Now duplicate the layer you have just created and rename it to “Horizontal Gradient”. Change the Layer Styles according to the image below.

Finally, create a 960px by 1px line in a new layer called “darklight” right above the previous two layers and fill it with #1d1d1d. Your navigation should now look somewhat like in the image below.

Now let’s try making a custom “home” link button that will stand out from the rest of the links in the navigation. Create a new layer, and make a selection with the Rounded Rectangle Tool (U) about 50px by 60px vertically, filled with #444444, and fill in the bottom rounded edges so the selection is only rounded at the top.

Download this home icon, open it in Photoshop, and import it into your existing canvas. Resize it to about 18px by 17px and fill it with #999999. Center it in the previous layer you have made and now you have a stylish home link!

Next we are going to add navigation items to our navigation! Grab your Horizontal Type Tool (T), set the following styles below, and type in a menu item. In our example, the first item is “Documentation” with a description of “theme support & guide”. Add as many items as you’d like, leaving a padding of 20px between each menu item.

Social Media Icons

For the next step, we are going to need social media icons. We’ll start by downloading this set of social media icons, by KomodoMedia, and then placing four icons and desaturating them (Shift + Ctrl + U) like in the image below.

Congratulations! The header of our site is now complete! Let’s continue onto the body of the site.

Step 4

Now that the entire header is done, we are going to keep going on to the body of our site.

Main Body

For starters, we are going to divide the body into two halves — one for the main body content and the other for the sidebar. Create a new layer, call it “main body” and make a selection with the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) 640px wide and as tall as you want (at least 1000px or so), starting directly below the header background. Fill this selection with #ffffff. Now create a new layer, call it “sidebar” and make a selection 320px wide on the right of the “main body” layer and make it as tall as the main body. Fill it with #e6e6e6.

Next, we will give the sidebar a slight inner shadow on the left side to create an “indented” illusion. Add the Layer Styles below to your “sidebar” layer.

Featured Slider

Create a new layer and using the Rectangle Marquee Tool (M), make a 960px by 360px selection right at the top of our body, directly beneath the navigation and fill it with #e6e6e6. Create another layer and leaving a 25px margin on all sides, inside the previous selection, make a 910px by 312px selection and fill it with #ffffff. In Layer Styles, add a 1px #dddddd inner stroke on this layer.

For the next step, we will need a sample image to use as a placeholder. Any image of anything will work so just find something that is 580px by 300px and put it in a new layer, fitting it 5px away from each side of the container we have just made.

Create a new layer and call it “tab_hover”. Grab the Rectangle Marquee Tool (M) and make a 320px by 41px selection directly right of the image, in the top-right corner of the white slider container. Fill it with any color. Using the Polygonal Lasso Tool, click 20px left of the rectangle, exactly halfway in vertically and hold Ctrl while dragging diagonally up and right until you meet the rectangle’s top-left corner. Still holding Ctrl, drag down until you meet the bottom-left corner and finally, go back to the starting position. Fill this selection with any color.

Proceed to adding the styles shown in the image below to the “tab_hover” layer.

Now make a 320px by 92px selection with the Rectangle Marquee Tool (M) directly beneath the tab, put it in a new layer called “tab_space” and apply the necessary Layer Styles described in the image.

Now let’s repeat the steps to create the rest of the tabs, following slightly different styles in order to differentiate the “active” state from the rest of the tabs.

Finally, we should come up with something that looks similar to this and all ready to go!

Step 5

Whew! We’re almost there! With the hardest part out of the way, let’s continue onto the body of our site. In this step, we will discuss key techniques such as spacing.

Let’s begin our “Latest Post” section with a post. Let’s make a border by making a 615px by 210px selection with the Rectangle Marquee Tool (M), filling it with any color in a new layer called “border” and then adding a gradient described in the image below. As soon as we’re done with that, insert a 610px by 200px image, leaving 5px padding within the frame. The image is not important, so once again, you can use whatever you would like as a placeholder!

Proper spacing is essential in a successful design. Our community blog theme demostrates its strength in overall consistency and spacing by having congruent margins all around the post elements to help the reader’s eye easily flow down the page. Let’s take a look at how our post will look, with the help of some guidelines!

The next part is relatively explanatory. Using the Horizontal Type Tool (T), type out a heading, meta information, and excerpt for placeholders (you can use the text used in the demo image to save time) referring to the previous image for spacing and alignment help. Refer to the image below for text styles needed. Once all of the text is added, grab the Rounded Rectangle Tool (U) and make some quick buttons (approximately 120px by 32px), align them with the left side of the post and add the styles shown in the image below. You should now have an attractive post that you can duplicate over and over until you are satisfied!

Step 6

Almost as vital a part as any in a community blog theme, the sidebar! For demonstrative purposes, we will just design a few generic widgets — obviously it would be impossible to cover a custom design for every widget out there but most of these will allow the creative juices to flow to create more!

For this part, we will need to download the free Icon Pack from Graphic River and import the RSS 48x48px and Twitter 48x48px icons into our project. Position these icons 20px away from the left side of the sidebar and make sure they are aligned vertically with the first post on the left.

Grab the Horizontal Type Tool (T) and type in a random number for the subscribers and followers using the Georgia font, and the words “subscribers” and “followers” in Arial as described in the image below.

How about a simple advertisement widget? Sure! Grab the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) and make a 280px by 410px selection, fill it with plain white, and give it an inner stroke of 1px #dddddd. Grab a couple of sample ads from Theme Forest and drop them into the new container, leaving 9-10px padding between each (depending on whether it’s between the border or between each ad).

Finally, type up a quick Text Widget with the Horizontal Type Tool (T) using the styles provided in the image below.

Grab the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) and make a 280px by 225px container. Fill it with #eeeeee and give it an inner stroke of 1px #dbdbdb. New layer, make a tab about 84px by 37px in the top left corner of the container, leaving 4px padding on each side, then in the same layer create another 270px by 180px selection and fill it with white, creating a rectangle with a small rectangle sticking out in the top left. Give it an inner stroke of 1px #e0e0e0. Finish off the other 2 tabs, leaving 4px padding on each side at all times. Fill out the text with Arial 12px Bold. Make a 3px by 3px bullet filled with #bbbbbb and create as many items as you’d like.

That’s it for the sidebar, let’s move onto the rest of the site!

Step 7

Now we’re slowly wrapping up this site with… you guessed it, the footer! Let’s prepare our footer by creating a quick background for it. Grab the Rectangle Marquee Tool (M) and create a 960px by 510px selection in a new layer, directly beneath the main body background. Fill this selection with #2d2d2d. This will serve as our footer with 4 columns in it. Directly beneath this block of color, make a selection 960px by 60px and fill it with #1d1d1d and put it in a new layer. This will serve as the “copyright” portion of the footer and a simple but effective way to signify the end of the page.

In our site, we will have 4 even columns in the footer, each 200px wide with a 25px margin between each one. To keep things uniform, we will also leave 25px at the top of our footer, after which we will have the headings of each column. Go ahead and grab the Horizontal Type Tool (T) and begin typing out the headings for each column, using the styles described in the image below. Leaving 20px underneath the headings, type out a short paragraph or a list of items separated by a simple “one pixel on, one pixel off” dotted divider.

Conclusion

Congratulations, you have just designed a clean, community blog theme in Adobe Photoshop. Hopefully you have learned some tips and tricks on how to design certain aspects of cleanly organized sites and are able to use these skills in projects of your own in the future!

As this is just a design tutorial, I haven’t gone into the theme-coding at all, but you can check out the Revolution theme at ThemeForest to see a live example.

Good luck and thanks for reading!

Webdesigntuts+

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