What do you look for in a blog theme?

litheon — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 07:34:00 GMT

I've been working on a new blog theme for MajorNelson.com for the past few months now and upon reviewing comments regarding it I'm fairly convinced that it needs a bit of work. Despite the attempts at a simple, yet pleasing presentation, it seems the theme has some issues. Namely it doesn't support some standards for user-accessibility, and well-formed markup. So there will be some changes in the conventions used for design; although it will be staying with tables, because, even though semantically tables shouldn't be used for anything but data, it still makes sense to use them since not all browsers easily support some of the CSS that would be required to using div tags as floating elements. In addition the the convention changes the theme itself will be compliant with CSS standards and markup standards, among some other tweaks to the rounding of corners and the reflection employed by certain parts of the theme.

So I'm looking for some criticism regarding the theme, specifically about the following:

What do you think of the navigation area at the top of the page? Does trading the sleakness of the current design to that of a more easily navigable one make sense?
What do you think of the link colors? Should the ones in content areas be changed based on what the link is in regard to?
Do the rounded corners look good or does it just look like there's just too much of an attempt at creating a Web 2.0 look?
Even if you use the sidebar collapse link on the top of the right side does it seem like there isn't enough space horizontally? (Especially when viewing a post's comments)
Do the posts seem to run together? Should there be more differentiation between them?
How do you think anonymous comments should be dealt with? Should they be hidden by default?
Is there anything else you don't like about the theme? Colors too bright or repeated too much?

The theme is a work in progress, and it's something that will be in-use for quite a while until the next itteration of a theme so any feedback you provide to improve the theme will better serve you when viewing the site. Also, any feature requests you may have would be appreciated as well. Once this theme is finished there is a high probability that in the future you will be able to reorganize items on the left and, assuming you choose to display it, the right columns using some of the amazing code available from brothercake.

litheon : Theme, Major Nelson

What do you look for in a blog theme?