So for most people, having a new blog design to start the year is uncommon. I don’t wanna say it’s something that I am looking forward on doing every year but for the third time in three years, I have always introduced a new design to refresh the blog and cater to my *new needs.
Now welcome to MelvinBlog 3.0! If you’re reading from your RSS, its time to come out of your shells to visit my actual site or you can look at this screenshot(click for a larger look):
As you can see, this blog still sports that magazine look although much more cleaner and less cluttered than the previous one.
Why Change?
First and foremost is to refresh the look of the blog. The Colormatic UBD theme has been in this blog for over a year now and we all know people get bored with same design over and over again.
The second reason is to clean things up. If you look at the mainstream blog redesign these days, you can see that most of them have started cleaning up the clutter. For instance, ProBlogger’s new design emphasizes a better spacing and lesser elements. Shoemoney’s blog is also just sporting a clean theme now.
When I decided to go to version 2.0, I had a lot of things in mind including some elements that I want to add that I haven’t added before. With that, I settled for ColorMatic, in which I can pretty much put a lot of things in one place without having users to scroll down.
A year has passed and I realized that some things aren’t really worth putting into the blog. With that I had to find a template that I can work with that still is a magazine theme, yet sports lesser clutter. Another factor that I always consider is that I don’t want to look like a mainstream blog (one which looks like another). So that’s why I settled for this design.
Websource Theme
The theme that you are looking now is called WebSource theme. It comes from ThemeForest.net and specifically a guy named DDStudios. You’re wondering why I didn’t go with top notch themes like StudioPress, Thesis, WooThemes, and etc. The reason as I mentioned above is that I hate being mainstream. Most bloggers would just want to jump into something just because a lot of people are into it.
Also as always, I did some minor customizations in the codes so to make sure that the blog will extremely look unique.
For me as long as the theme works, doesn’t have that much bugs and is greatly structured, then I’m in to consider it. And to add, Websource looks extremely unique while also fitting my needs and requirements.
The redesign isn’t fully complete yet. As you can see, there are some elements that still look weird or you may visit a certain page that looks odd. In fact, I don’t even have a logo yet as I’m planning to implement a new one for this new design so my designer is currently working on it right now. Let’s say the site is just 50% done and I’m just excited to launch it right away. 😉
The Old Look
So for the last time, let’s savor the old look for MelvinBlog which is also known as Version 2.0. This theme from ThemeWars has done a lot of good things, made me good money and helped me engage my content more to my readers.
So that’s it. I will just let you find for yourself some new features and elements that I added and/or that comes with this new design. Please also expect that there might be some bugs or minor flaws (as mentioned) that I haven’t found out yet or I’m currently fixing so please bare with it for the moment. 😉
As always you’re opinion matters a lot to me. 🙂