Giving my blog a face lift has been long overdue! I’ve been wanting to try my hand at creating my own theme rather than using ones that I’ve downloaded. That way I can make it my own and accomplish my own goals. My reluctance is that it will take time and will surely have problems that I can’t address as fast as I should. I’ve finally decided that those issues are worth it.
Here’s what it looks life before the facelift:
It’s not too bad, but my biggest complaint is all of the ads. I tried to go the easy route, and just let Google put the ads where it thought was best. But, there’s just way too many. They take over the blog and cheapen it.
So, here’s my new design:
For inspiration, I asked my local Deepseek to give me some examples of other tech blogs to look at it. It mentioned The Verge, Gizmodo, Smashing Magazine, PostHog Blog, and Web Designer Depot. I think I got the most inspiration from the Verge, but I took little elements from the others as well.
One of the elements that I liked from the Verge was the navigation bar at the top. So, I tried to make one inspired by it:
Getting this completely where I want it is going take me a while. There’s still a bunch of tweaks that I want to make. I also need to make sure it looks good on mobile and smaller formats. I want to make ad experience even better, too.
I would love feedback if you see anything.