Customization

This is my first venture into the world of blogging. I started this blog only a few days before writing this post, and its design is still a work in progress. The original state of the blog is reflected in the images to follow, and shows the blog prior to customization of theme, colors, and fonts.

The left-most picture shows the very first blog post, while the other two pictures are from the original home page. As you can see, there is no navigation menu or clear division between the content. There is also no way to easily access the “about me” post, which is commonly easily accessable on other blogs so they reader may learn about the author.

In my first attempts at customizing the blog, I chose to keep it simple. I chose a theme that can be applied to a blog about almost anything. I also picked a solid off-white background color that does not detract from the blog’s content and complements the colors in the photo used as the header portion of the home page. This photo, depicting forest green succulents, was chosen because of its high quality and because out of all the images I had access to that fit the size of the header, it seemed to be the most simplistic choice.

Admittedly, it was challenging to customize a blog that does not have any content on it and is mainly meant to be used as a tool for learning. Since I am primarily using this blog as a space to complete assignments for the web technologies course, I chose to create a separate page to house the posts for this course, which can be easily accessed through a navigation bar at the top of the page as seen in the image above.

I also chose to display excerpts including images from recent blog posts chronologically on the front page. This seemed like a good way to fill empty space and provide a preview of what the blog is about, as I do not have other content to display at this time. The fonts used throughout the blog are, like the other elements of the blog, kept simple and easy to read. I also chose to stick to two different fonts, one for blog posts and one for headers, in order to preserve simplicity and usability.

Although there is currently not much to display on this blog, making certain design elements challenging, I hope to apply the knowledge learned in this course to further enhance its appearance and usability.