A pull quote is a quoted snippet from an associated article that is used to highlight a bit of the post. Pull quotes are the most effective element for adding improved scanability to your text, and by extension the perception of your sites usefulness.

Here’s the basics. First, create a new class in your themes style sheet, call it .quote. This is the base of how your pull quotes will be formatted and positioned. Specify whether you want it to float to the left or right, what margins you like, and…

The recently released WordPress 2.5 was a major update and included many new features, most notably the inclusion of Gravatars. Gravatar stands for globally recognized avatar. It essentially provides an easy way for blog commentators to attach their own image to comments all across the web.

Why you should add Gravatars to your Blog

Gravatars are supported by all major blog platforms however it’s the inclusion of Gravatar in a Wordpress Release which will really make it the system which all bloggers use (I’m actually suprised it took so long for Gravatars…

Another element in the sidebar of my portfolios new blog design is a menu that changes what it displays depending on which one you click. So when you are on the Archive page the archive link changes state to display where you currently are, and when you are on the News page the subcategories are displayed below the link.

Here’s what I threw together.

This displays the subcategory when in the News category, and highlights the News link.
First I determined that the parent News category was 5, and then told it when…

Effective blog design includes the design of a blog itself, its navigation elements, and its communication tools. Blogs have a lot of standard elements, articles, comments, categories, and archives; all of which need to be presented well within the blog template design.

Those elements put a lot of constraint on what is possible with a blog design. You should be focusing on making sure your blog is easy to navigate to find the content and easy for visitors to connect with the blogger.

• Blog creative look - Some people do not put a…

As I was redesigning my own site I debated what resolution to use. More and more sites are optimized for screens at 1024×768, and the WC3 reports 80% of users have monitors that big or bigger. Even my own stats suggest users on my site with 800×600 at only 4%. But it’s still 4%, which is more then Opera, Safari, and IE5 combined and I still make sure my sites work within that small percentage of users, so why not these?

One solution is liquid layouts, having the site stretch to…