Elements of great blog design

I want to do a complete redesign of gregwolejko.com. My goal is to come up with something that will be clean, zen-like and totally awesome. So here I am thinking “where to start?” and “what to do now?”. So to move forward from here let me answer those simple questions below and see where this will lead me.

Who?

Me. Greg Wolejko. Web2.0 evangelist on his way to greatness. I want to do a complete redesign of my blog. Do everything from scratch and end up with a marvelous minimalistic layout.   

Why?

To make site look just awesome. As I mentioned before I really enjoy my current theme but I do believe gregwolejko.com can do way better. And so, instead of endless tweaking my current design I will work on making entirely new theme. This sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

Where?

Here. On Wordpress. But all of that I will be posting about will be valid for any other blogging platform or entirely custom work. Bottom line here is me rambling about what are the traits of an extremely great design. 

And so it seems that it is time for me to list elements of a great blog design.

Elements:

• Typography - not a big expert here but I’ll have to decide if there is something more awesome for me than Helvetica
• UX - user experience. All you UX experts out there will agree that there is no point of making a new design without even a frame of what user experience should be.
• Grid layout - this will be fun. I am a great fan of so called grid layout. I’ll introduce the concept and make my case why this thing rocks.
• Header - moving into more detailed aspects. Header is the first thing that a new user notices and therefore it has to be eye-catching yet simple and clean 
• Navigation - part of the header thing but it deserves a whole post for itself. Why? Stay with me and check it out.
• Main content - this is no-brainer. How to display a content for it be engaging for the user?
• Sidebar - this one I will enjoy. There are lots of things that one can put it there. But what should go first? What functionality should sidebar offer for a user
• Footer - and you know how much I love big footers. Here I’ll look into what can be placed there to bring the site to its full potential.  

To sum up:

What I want to do now is to research and blog about each and every aspect of great blog design and at the end come up with whole new design of gregwolejko.com. That’s the plan. Keep your fingers crossed.