Brand New Look of Artatm

When we started this blog the main concentration was on the content. We strived to put all our minds towards the content. Thus we choose a fairly simple and decent design in wordpress and started off our work. But, design of your own blog is very important, maybe it should not be out of the world design but atleast it should be something with which your blog can get its unique recognition. When we started off we hardly had 5-10 visitors and 20 odd pageviews a day. But today we have a reach of around 18,000 visitors and around 40,000 pageviews a month.

We have been working on the redesign of ArtAtm for quite sometime now. We had some considerations then reconsiderations on the look and feel of the blog. The maximum time was invested in deciding the structure of the blog, mainly whether it should be a two column or three column blog. Though we love 3 coloumn blogs, we at last settled for the 2 column, the reason being three columns mostly for the sake of people with big screens. 3 column blogs look brilliant on the bigger screen. But there are many who still work on smaller screens thus we decided to put the mark on the 2 column blog.

Mostly the design work has been handled by me(Rocky) and the coding part has been handled by Jitu.

The Old Design

The New Design

What’s new on the Blog??

Color combination

This was the only thing on which we had no debate at all. The decision of selecting black color was unanimous. There were two reasons for selecting black first, black is better than white and all the other colors when it comes to energy saving and pressure on the eyes, secondly, I love Black color.

Header

There is not much change in the header as we decided to keep it as simple as possible, except for some changes like inserting a small gap on the top and putting the social bookmarking icons on it. The Search feature has also been shifted to the top for a better view.

Sidebar

Well there are not many changes here. The main part that we have changed over here is the dotted line covering of the titles to give a better look to them. Also the color of the tiiels been changed to green.

Author Info Section

In our previous design we did not have any author info section maybe because we didn’t knew how to make one or may be we were too lazy to do some hard work. But this time around we have changed that included this section so that we could put some info of the author whose post is being published.

Share and Bookmark Section

We have removed the sharing and bookmarking plugin because we always try to avoid plugins and instead use some WordPress Hacks

Comments Section

Old Comment Section Design

New Comment Section Design

In our previous design the comments section was just not worth looking at. In the new design we have seperated both the comments and the tracbacks. Stylized the comments section and also the Gravatars.

Footer

Old Footer Section

New Footer Section

We have put a lot of our focus on this area. In the previous design the footer was almost invisible. It had no content in it and absolutely nothing that could attract the readers towards it. We have tried to change that. We have now included Popular Posts, Our Friend, Tags and Get In touch dividing them into four different columns. We would also be adding the Authors list in the near future (after we get some guest posts). In here you may also see the dotted lines dividing the topics.

What Next???

We are still in the process of trying to improve our blog which I am sure is not going to finish. We still have many things to do from the design and also the content point of view.

Your Suggestions/Feedbacks

We have been working and thinking and re-thinking about the design of our blog. We have had our own opinions, agreements and disagreements and this new design is what is the result of all those things. Now, we need your opinions and suggestions and even critics so that we could improve our blog and along with it our own thought process.

We are very thankful to everyone who have read this article on our new design, please do help us to promote this article by digging, retweeting, bumping this article.

Written by Rocky

A music lover, creativity is all that he has in his mind and a very avid reader. He is the Founder of ArtAtm. He is a web designer by profession from India. You may want to Follow Him On Twitter