You may wonder what theme this is here on me-blogs-it.com, because it may looks familiar to you, yet you haven’t seen it anywhere. It’s a self-made theme called “General Blogdesign” (I guess, the name already explains why it may looks familiar). After having visited a countless number of blogs and browsed through the themes available on WordPress.org I decided to create a theme on my own which I can use for any upcoming blogproject. I tried to create a layout that is universally useable what meant that the theme itself should be more or less characterless. Still, it needed to be modifiable so that every blog which uses the theme looks different from others. I decided to take a simple “header / three-column / footer”-structure as a basis.

Basic structure

 The Logo and the Eye-catcher (on this site it’s the “comic-me”) are position: absolute; so that they can blast the structure and create a feeling of three-dimensionality by laying over the other parts. Then I added some features which I don’t know from other sites – so I guess, they’re new:

Subscription bar

Instead of creating a big RSS-icon and place it somewhere conspicuously on the site, I collected all feeds in a simple subscription bar and put it on top of the site. I tried to make it as simple and tidy as possible. When you click on “Mail-Feed subscription” for example, you don’t open a new site, but a new area in which all you have to enter is the substantially needed Email-adress. I can imagine to enhance the bar by removing the atom-Feed-link and using feedburner’s Smartfeed-link instead, and adding a twitter-link in return.

About

Sometimes, when I visited blogs for the first time, I didn’t know what the blog stood for and looked for an “About”-link. I wasn’t always able to find one. So I wanted my first-time-visitors to see immediately what this blog is about instead of adding such an about-link to my footer/header/sidebar/whatever. Therefore I created the about-text right next to the Logo.
Yet, visitors who haven’t visited the site for the first time don’t need to read the about-text with every single site-view. That’s why I made the text collapsible. The setting (collapsed / not collapsed) is saved in a cookie, so you don’t have to collapse it again afterwards.

Eye catcher 

The logo is in the center, the about-text is on the right, so what is on the left? I used the space to place an eye-catcher. On me-blogs-it it’s the comic-me, which give’s the site a face and a personal note.

You notice: The actual innovations are all made at the top of the site. And here are some things you may wonder about:

Three-column

I don’t fancy two-column themes. Three-column themes where the sidebars are next to each other look weird. So I decided for three-column where the sidebars are at the sides – next to the content.

Centered

There are still sites where the content is squashed at the left side. I think these times are slowly running out and a centred look will establish. I mean, look at all the big sites – they already have their content centered: Google, YouTube, MySpace, flickr, Gawker, twitter, facebook, Techcrunch, Blogger, Gizmodo, RapidShare, Microsoft, Apple, AOL, eBay… and so on.

Missing White-Space

This is actually made by my modification of the theme. I use the overall-color to signify subjectivity. White-space is neutral, my blog however isn’t – that’s why I don’t wanted to have too much white-space.

No JavaScript required

There are some people out there who don’t have JS enabled. Yet my site does need JS – for example in the subscription bar when the email-adress-input has to fold out. I didn’t want to handicap these non-JS-people and looked for ways to get the information if JS is enabled or not before the site is even built-up in the browser so I could react on it via PHP. But I didn’t find a way to accomplish that. So I solved the problem in another way: When the site is built-up in the browser non-JS-enabled and JS-enabled people see the same things. But as soon as the site is ready, a JS-function makes the parts which need JS (e.g. the subscription bar) visible and hides the parts which are actually only made for the non-JS-visitors. So, only the visitors who have JavaScript enabled also see the parts which require JS.