Blog Designer News

In the past, I have developed some beatiful blog designs and really effective ‘front ends’ (the bit the customer sees).  The really are a ‘beauty to behold’.  However, the back end management of the blog – how I or my customer changed the elements to be displayed on the front end – was (at times) incredibly difficult.

I’m not referring to your standard blog layout here – where you have a content panel and 1 or 2 sidebars.  I am talking about the Magazine Style layouts or the designs where the front page of the blog is different to the rest.

Typically in a Magazine Style layout, you will have elements that are ‘pulled’ from the content on the blog and displayed on the homepage to give an overview of the type of content available.  Perhaps one of the most popular ‘Magazine Style’ layouts are Brian Gardners Lifestyle Theme.

The theme is lovely and Brian provides some very nice management functions for it in the code however, modifying the front page elements – the categories that display, the image that is included for  each post etc – requires a knowledge of php and coding… great for someone like me, not for my site owners.  Believe me when I say that at some point the site owner is going to want to change what is displayed on the front page and will try to do it themselves!

Another challenge that I encountered with the theme is the use of the Featured Content Gallery Widget.  It is just AWESOME – and truly adds a dimension to the layout however, ensuring that you have an image to display in that widget is crucial – if you don’t, the widget stops working…. causing grief for many of my clients.

To alleviate most of this, I have been working on administration menus that appear in WP-Admin that literally give my clients the ability to ‘point and click’ to choose what they want on the home page.  For the Featured Content Gallery, I made a modification to the code that will display a ‘default image’ if one is not specified in the blog post (and allow the site owner to specify what that default image through the admin panel).

When your client is ready for the ‘next level’ blog design – don’t just think about the front end.  Think about your clients and the fact that you want to empower them to manage their content.  In the long run, they will thank you for making it easy for them

As a client, spend time talking to your blog designer about how easy managing the content display will be.  It might add a little cost to the overall project – but it will save you much more in terms of money, time and frustration.

About the Author:  I'm a business woman with over 20 years experience in the IT Industry. I am a 'tech' - yes, I used to get my hands dirty - but turned to business management during that time due to my ability to translate business requirements to 'tech speak' and vice versa. I approach web services work from a holistic point of view. As I have a strong business background as well as technical background, my aim is to help people map their online presence to their business processes ensuring that the website is an enabler and supporting the business rather than determining the direction of the business. Find out more about my services at Ask Charly Leetham or Follow Me On Twitter