Before you get me wrong, my view on UBD services and products doesn’t stem from jealousy. No, I’ve already decided not to take the freelance and paid themes route. Therefore, UBD is not my competition nor am I interested in earning that level of money. Freelance and paid-themes are not worth while, for me.

I think it’s sad how UBD and its paid themes have gotten to where they are, in a short period of time, all thanks to exposure and not quality in services and products because they don’t strive to make WordPress more attractive. Furthermore, Unique Blog Designs custom and pre-made products are not unique.

Compare Nate Whitehill’s (owner of UBD) and John Chow’s (redesign by Nate) blog designs and you’ll get the picture.

As for the pay-per-download or “exclusive themes” as UBD like to call them, how can you label something exclusive when you’re going to resell it over and over again? Beats me. Second, most of the “exclusive themes” are not unique and not the top notch quality that you’d expect from a $79 price tag (about $30 above Template Monster’s price per theme).

Compare the following themes from UBD and then tell me how unique they are:

The above might be an unfair comparison because I compared UBD themes to themselves and most of their themes are done by one designer, Adriaan Pienaar. However, search any free WordPress themes database or site and you’ll run cross more similar themes to the examples above. Again, what UBD sell is nothing new or unique. At this point, its products are simply “unique” because they’re from one designer with a recognizable style. I could do the same thing and label myself unique, but that isn’t really honest when it comes to offering something truthfully different for WordPress theme customers is it?

Beyond the fact that UBD theme’s are not unique, let’s break down their quality. The structure of the designs are not carefully thought out. You don’t need to be a designer to recognize their apparent spacing and alignment problems. Graphics-wise, they suffer the Template Monster syndrome, which is too many in your face eye-candy - meant for fooling uninformed customers into thinking they’ve gotten their money worth.

But unlike Template Monster, what’s worse is the quality of UBD’s eye-candy. They’re cheaply done gradients, shadows, and reflections. Obviously, UBD’s main designer for the “exclusive themes” is subtlety-intolerant, contrast-intolerant, design-flow-intolerant, and focus-intolerant.

Without the exposure and the fact that UniqueBlogDesigns.com is really the only site or service with an ample amount of paid themes to compete with Template Monster, I would never understand why people would do business with or buy from UBD.

Before you criticize me for this honest and blunt review (I wouldn’t mind if you do), know that I’m contributing to UBD’s success by writing about it. In conclusion, UBD is simply a new cookie cutter service / product that customers are not tired of yet and it remains a joke until it cleans up its act by:

• hiring more designers for variety in styles
• pushing the limit for WordPress theme users like what Brian Gardner did with the Revolution theme
• striving to make WordPress more attractive while still making money

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If you haven’t noticed, Adii (in motion) also does banner advertising on Wpdesigner. He must really love my blog. But, that’s not going to stop me from ripping him a new one.

First of all, who is Adii?
Adii is a freelance WordPress designer from Cape Town, South Africa. You can browse his portfolio here. For the most part, his style is bold and colorful. Whoever said web design is subjective surely haven’t said it to Adii. However, that doesn’t seem to be raising eyebrows at all as his clients are keeping him busy. He must be doing some thing right, price, service, and support-wise.

Design-wise
Adii.co.za sports a clean, grid-based, three column blog design. But Adii, you know I despise wide columns with a small font size, in which you could fit eighteen words in one line. Here’s your weekend to-do list to improve your blog’s design:

• Cut the average number of words per line down to fourteen or twelve.
• Don’t justify the main content text because that makes it hard for readers to keep track of which line they’re reading.
• Change the “Want to hire me?” text color to light blue.
• Play with the search form at the upper right hand corner because it’s not easy to spot that it’s a search form right now.

Content-wise
To date, the most successful series on his blog has been the Mini Interview series. Can you guess whom he first interviewed? It was yours truly, the potato behind Wpdesigner.com. I’m guessing I had something to do with motivating him to continue his interview series after sending him some traffic love for the interview effort.

Besides the fact that the mini-interviews are helping Adii’s blog grow traffic-wise, it sure doesn’t suck to be able to get in touch with admirable designers and developers like Veerle Pieters, Jonathan Snook, Roger Johannson, and many more.

Not to mention, Adii worked up the courage and patience (that I dumbfounded-ly didn’t have) to ask for interviews from guys like Seth Godin and Matt Mullenweg.

Below are some of my favorite interviews.

• Listen up if you want to freelance too…
• Wanna roll around in this Sandbox?
• Nate Whitehill on online business and blogging

With the mini-interviews aside, Adii also write about marketing, WordPress, and web design, but surprisingly he requested for this review to focus on the mini-interviews, which I have no idea why because I think his other series and articles are far better than the mini-interviews simply because his interview questions suck . Especially for WordPress related interviews, there aren’t much room for unique answers and the readers are left wanting more details. Details that Adii’s questions often failed to cover.

Personally, I think WordPress is his strongest topic and he should focus on that to further establish himself as one of the leaders in WordPress design and development. For example, it would be nice to see Adii continue his recent flood of commentary on what Brian and I are working on, regarding premium themes.

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Nowadays, clients want to use WordPress as a total CMS (content management system), not just a blogging platform. Theme authors need an answer for that demand. I believe Revolution is that answer.

Design Wise

Out of the box, Revolution is a well-built theme that doesn’t need any plugin to work. From the demo, apparently, she doesn’t need post-meta-data and a typical sidebar on the front page either. You might get the impression that Revolution is simply a typical blog theme stripped of its extra features, but to assert that first impression as a fact would be missing the point. You should think of her as a design that works with WordPress, not based on WordPress.

Although Revolution is far from a stunning-looker, which explains the $59.95 price tag, she is a stylish and flexible minimalist with nice logo curves. She is built for modification, but don’t mess with Revolution or you’ll miss her bold horizontal navigation. Beyond the style that attracts me to Revolution, I’m not totally in love with her double border and awkward looking magnifying glass near the search form.

The double border reminds me of the table cellspacing=1 days, which were times that I’ve gladly forgotten until now. (Why the double border Brian? Huh? Why did you do it?) Luckily, you can remove it. As for the magnifying glass, what else can I say other than it shouldn’t be there?

One last thing to critique is the left padding of the main column on single pages. The text for the column is aligned too far to the left. It needs more left padding.

Code Wise

Now that you’ve gotten tired of my little nag about the subtle details, let’s go beyond face value and under the hood. Under the hood, most of Revolution seems alright.

The use of H1 tags for titles other than the site’s name is good for SEO (search engine optimization), but that practice is questionable since every page of your website is a home page. And on each home page, you need to know where you are at before you need to know what it’s about. (If you’re using H1 for SEO reasons then don’t use it for the name of your site on every page.)

I’m a little bit disappointed to see B (bold) and BR (line break) tags. Instead of:

Revolution should use:

I believe the example above is a simpler solution which also opens up more room for easy customizations.

The inline styles (

) also make me cringe, but they might be a necessary evil to prevent overlapping floats in certain browsers. I don’t know for sure because I haven’t gotten the chance to test Revolution.

Pricing

For regular use, Revolution is $59.95. For developers, the permission to use it over and over again for your own client-projects costs $199.95. To remove Revolution’s credits and credit links, it’s $50 for each removal.

You might think those prices are expensive, but remember that Revolution was not built for you and me. She was built for small business site owners and full time developers that need a specific solution like this. And for them, those prices are very attractive.

Conclusion

Design wise, Revolution isn’t worth $59.95 for users that make decisions based on first impression yet, but the way she’s built makes up for the price by providing a specific solution for certain people looking to use WordPress as a CMS. Not to mention, she’s still in the early stages of development.

Code-wise, I’d like to see Revolution’s later versions include dynamic selectors. That would make customizing her much easier for regular users and especially for developers.

Beyond Revolution, it’s interesting to see its author, Brian Gardner, venture into the premium themes zone, which is something that I’m planning to do in September.

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So far, only blogs in need of redesigns have been reviewed. With Iffect.net, the challenge is that its design is already clean and clear. There’s not much room for improvement, unless you want to tear it apart and create a completely new look (based on its structure).

I’ll take advantage of this challenge to go over some trivial points that would make a regular review very lengthy.

Header: Make banner clickable

While I was browsing Iffect, I tried to click on the banner several times, to go back to the home page. But, the banner is an image background, not an inline image link that you can click on. That is a NO-NO. When your logo or banner is that large and prominent, it needs to link back to your home page.

I don’t like how the Home, About, and Contact links are pushed to the right. If most of your design’s alignment is to the left then you shouldn’t align anything to the right, unless you don’t want normal users to use it. I also don’t like how those links are separated from the RSS, Email, and Question Mark links. I understand they’re two separate groups of links, but you can place them on the same line and still give the RSS, Email, and Question Mark links icons to distinguish them. In this case, it’s more clutter than convenience, but that’s purely my personal opinion.

Invalid XHTML

I looked through the source codes and there’s a lot of tags that were not closed properly, especially the line-break (BR) tags. This is nothing to worry about because your source codes don’t need to be completely valid. Another invalid area is the Related Posts list. The unordered-list (UL) for that area is not structured correctly. The list of related links and title, Related Posts, need to sit within a list-item (LI) tag.

Main Column

I like the easy-to-read, big post titles, but the post-title underline is a bit distracting. It’s too bold. The underline’s color should be different from the post-title link color.

For the postmetadata area (comments link, categories, and etc.), I don’t like how the category links are floating to the left. That presents a problem when you list a certain post under several categories. If you do attach a certain post to multiple categories, the category link-listing will not fit in that space, which ends up looking out of place. If you scroll to the bottom, you can see that the category links and “keep looking” link are on the same line. That’s because the category links couldn’t fit on one line.

I had the same problem with Wpdesigner’s previous postmetadata layout.

Too many H1 Tags

Like I mentioned in other reviews, you shouldn’t use the H1 tag multiple times on one single page. This problem is very common among WordPress themes, but with Iffect.net’s design, even the Comments title link uses the H1 tag. That’s definitely something that should get fixed.

Search form: Add Javascript

Because Iffect.net’s search form doesn’t use a search button, it has the, “search this site…,” phrase as default text for the search form to indicate that it is a search form. That’s no problem. But when you click on the search form, that text doesn’t disappear. Anyone using that search form has to delete the default text before typing in the search term. I don’t know about you, but that’s annoying for me. You can fix this problem by using Javascript to make the default text disappear, once a user click on the search form.

Sidebar: Change link color

Like the rest of the design, the sidebar is very clean. But, sidebar block titles or subheadings are in caps. If people are having trouble reading your headlines, when you display text in all caps, make sure that you increase the letter-spacing through CSS. That will make the text (in all caps) much easier to read. In Iffect.net’s case, it’s okay.

Apart from the inconsistent structure of the sidebar (not all blocks or sections of Iffect’s sidebar are structure the same way), I don’t like the black link color because the sidebar text is also black. The links should be blue. I’m aware that a long list of bright blue links can be overwhelming. If that’s the excuse for black links then make the sidebar links dark blue.

Comments Template: Not enough contrast

Comments are well-spaced and separated from each other. The only thing I don’t like is the background color. The comment text and background need more contrast.

The End and Reminders

Although it’s important to stand out with a unique, well-design blog, don’t stress over it. Design is subjective. Blogging is about content. Focus on content.

Also, like I stated above, this is the first by-request review, if you have any site to suggest or request a review for, I’ll review it, but note that I will not review every suggested or requested site.

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The main Gizmodo problems are its organization and colors.

Colors

I came across an article claiming that green on yellow is easier to read than black on white. Personally, I’m not going to use green on yellow anytime soon. However, a full page of black text on white background is very hard on the eyes. After all, browsing a website is not like reading a book. That’s why I try to stick with the black on white combination, but also try to limit the total amount of white background on a web page.

With that said, I like Gizmodo’s background color. It’s bright, but not completely white. On the other hand, I don’t like its text (dark blue) and link colors (brown orange). The overall combination doesn’t have much contrast. A color scheme without enough contrast isn’t friendly and is especially a problem for users with poor vision.

The sidebar links and date-bar background color also don’t have enough contrast. Other than the body background color, I’d say make everything darker.

If you’re not good with colors like me, use sites like Colourlovers.com to help you with color ideas.

Layout and Organization

Layout-wise, I don’t like the how the layout is aligned all the way to the left. That can only mean there’s a very wide range of empty space, to the right, for users with large monitors. Most of us don’t use gigantic monitors, but how would you like to use a 30-inch monitor with two-third of its space being empty and having to focus on the far left side of the screen? Centering your layout is not a difficult task and it benefits everyone.

Approximately, this is what that problem would look like:

The Gizmodo people didn’t get it all wrong. The big post title font size is a plus. That makes it easier to scan headlines when you’re not reading from an RSS reader. I also like the post date bar at the top (similar to TechCrunch’s post-date layout). Instead of stamping every post with a date, Gizmodo has just one date because they publish a lot of posts, each day. If you blog very often and publish multiple times per day, you should imitate Gizmodo’s post-date.

For the regular font size, it’d be better if Gizmodo use 12px instead of 11px, since Gizmodo’s main column is very wide.

Structure-wise, I like how the left sidebar comes after the content, in the source codes. That allows search engines to crawl the content before the sidebar. If you’re going to use a two-column design with a left sidebar, do it like Gizmodo. Make the sidebar come after the content, in the source codes.

Sidebar content

Despite liking the sidebar positioning, I don’t like how all the blocks or sections in the sidebar are divided. It takes a closer look to tell where each sidebar block ends and what each block contains. The sidebar needs darker colors, bigger links, and bigger subheadings to clearly indicate where each block ends or begins.

Comments template

Making the comments template have less contrast than the content is understandable because you want to keep the focus on the content, but not in this case. You already have a low-contrast color scheme. There’s no reason to lower the contrast for the comments template.

Also, I don’t like the fact that Gizmodo requires you to sign up, in order to start commenting. Gizmodo’s reason for this rule is that their editors want to focus more on the content, not moderating the comments.

Whether you’re trying to collect e-mail addresses by requiring people to sign up or just lazy to regulate the comments. I say that’s senseless.

Blogging is a social thing and comments are a big part of blogging, not to mention commenting helps build communities. In my opinion, anytime you try to limit the comment system is bad. Unless the users get benefits for signing up (other than access to post comments), you shouldn’t require sign-ups.

Closing disclosures and reminders

This post is lengthy. Yet, it’s not a thorough review. You’re welcome to point out all the areas that I haven’t reviewed for Gizmodo. You’re also welcome to review Wpdesigner and / or suggest future sites for me to review.

Again, this review and review series are meant to help you improve your own blog’s design and performance. And although a well-designed blog is a big plus, it shouldn’t be your priority. At the end of the day, you should focus on producing great content.

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Kevin of Blogging Tips recently asked me to guest blog on BloggingTips.com. Immediately, I was interested because I never guest-blogged before and because I always wanted to run a blog about…blogging tips. What a surprise huh?

(Is guest blogging the way low-level bloggers like me have fun? There’s not much joy that you can get from writing a guest blog entry, but it was fun for me, without the smiling and laughing uncontrollably of course.)

Instead of writing about a topic that would compliment Blogging Tips current topics, I succumbed to reviewing the blog itself because I couldn’t help myself. Read my review to learn how to better integrate your ads.

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TechCrunch.com is a distinguished blog by Michael Arrington dedicated to profiling internet products and companies. With 389,000 subscribers, there’s not much Tech Crunch can do wrong and anyone would get intimidated by the possible backlash of criticizing Tech Crunch, but that’s not why you’re reading this review so let’s rip TechCrunch.com a new one shall we?

Basic Layout

• Move the content to the middle would you? - Tech Crunch sports the three-column layout with one main column and two right sidebars, a layout that puts advertisers first.

  This layout is a win-win because you get to put advertisers first (more money per ad), separate ads from content, and let your readers know the right side of your blog is basically crap decorations. (Those decorations earn Tech Crunch more than $60,000 per month.)

  This layout is a lose-lose because it’s awkward for readers’ eyes to digest the content. When you look at the computer, your eyes naturally focus on the center. With this layout, you have to start from the far left and stop at the center of the page. (Both Tech Crunch and Wpdesigner are guilty of this.) If you want a three-column design and want what’s best for the readers, put the main column in the middle.

  It’s also a lose-lose for advertisers because their ads don’t get enough clicks. This layout puts advertisers first, but doesn’t deliver the amount of clicks that it should. What the? It’s because of size and placement.

  Placement - If you take a look at the ads, they’re nowhere near the content. The closer you place ads near content the more clicks the ads will get. Size - The main banners are the 125px by 125px button banners. Yea, those. Nobody clicks those, unless a certain banner gets very creative.

  If the ads don’t get enough clicks then why do people advertise there? The answer is branding.

• Ow! My eyes! My freakin’ eyes! - Tech Crunch’s main colors are white and green. Reading that blog makes me wish I was colorblind (no offence, I’m just jealous). That’s bad enough, but why does the font size have to be 11px too? With a 570px (5.7 inches) main column, your font size should be at least 12px.

  570px main column and 11px font size, that’s an average of 16 to 18 words per line. Your eyes will quickly get tired of having to move far across the screen. 12 to 14 words per line is good.

Comments Template

I actually like Tech Crunch’s comments template. It’s well-spaced (plenty of room in between comments), very clear, easy to follow, and easy to recognize who is posting each comment. However, I would make the gray background color (for every other comment) a little bit brighter. You already know green on white is hard to read so don’t get me started with green on gray.

Another thing I want to point out is the fact that Tech Crunch puts track backs before comments, which actually means you don’t even have to post the first comment or even post a great comment to attract Tech Crunch readers to your site. You just have to be the first to track back.

Personally, I wouldn’t want people to manipulate my blog like that.

Size and Speed

Tech Crunch takes more than 100 seconds to load for 56k users. Generally, that’s bad because you have less than eight seconds to keep a user in front of a loading screen. However, whether this is bad for Tech Crunch depends on the number of Tech Crunch’s 56k users. Most of the problems contributing to the slow loading time are the advertisements. You can’t really blame Tech Crunch because that problem is in the hands of Federated Media, which manages Tech Crunch’s ads. However, you CAN blame Tech Crunch for the amount of ads.

I don’t think this is a big problem for Tech Crunch because most of its readers get content through RSS. Remember the 389,000 subscribers?

Spacing and Alignment

Except for content in the main column, nothing about Tech Crunch is organized. Here’s a thought. How about spending some of that $60,000, generated by the right sidebars, to fix the right sidebars?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Like Problogger, Tech Crunch has multiple H1 title tags on the front page. Although it makes sense to break your content down, block by block, with multiple sets of H1, H2, and H3 title tags, if you’re starting to get into on-page SEO, use only one H1 title tag per page.

The End

That’s it for this installment of my review series. Again, this review series is meant to spot blog design performance problems so you can learn from them to improve your own blog. My reviews are not complete reflections of what I think of the reviewed blogs, just the design aspect. And at the end of the day, you should focus on creating great content (not designs) because the blogs that I’ve reviewed have made it without a pretty face.

Also, I have no problem with you reviewing Wpdesigner. If you do review Wpdesigner, let me know.

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Speed

According to WebsiteOptimization, Problogger.net takes 92 seconds to load for 56k users. Despite more and more users making the switch to broadband connection, it’s important to cater to 56k users, regardless of your target audience.

To decrease loading time, Darren could:

• Make MyBlogLog avatars smaller or lessen how many avatars to display. I’m sure a lot of blogs have had problems with My Blog Log (take NetBusinessBlog for example).
• Limit the size of sponsored banners. One of the button banners (125 x 125) on Problogger is 54kb. The rest of the button banners are between 8kb and 15kb.
• Decrease the size of in-content photos and images. Darren’s photo with Guy Kawasaki and Jeremy Shoemaker is 159kb. Open that photo in Photoshop, select Save for Web, then adjust the options for optimum size and quality.

Despite the fact that some users don’t actually come to Problogger for content (RSS subscribers), Problogger does get well over 100,000 unique visitors per month. For sure, a portion of that number are 56k users.

Cross Browser Issue

Unlike Wpdesigner, Problogger.net doesn’t look the same in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. (Don’t burn me for not testing with other browsers. I don’t have time for it. Thanks.)

Here’s Problogger in Firefox:

Here’s Problogger in Internet Explorer 6.0:

Colors

Other than the main content, which is black text on white background, Problogger is hard to read. Also, the main link color, orange, isn’t dark enough.

• The three blocks, at the top, to highlight top content on Problogger are hardest to read. It’s great that Darren highlights the most popular content on his blog so they don’t get lost in the archives. And yes, your eyes should gravitate toward the latest content (below those three blocks). However, that shouldn’t be an excuse for using white on gray, gray on gray, and white on orange color schemes.
• The sidebar doesn’t have enough contrast and contains mainly links. If that’s the case, why not make those links darker?

Missing and Broken Features

• Problogger’s individual post pages are missing the next and previous links. That’s probably because of the WP-Pagenavi plugin that Darren uses to generate the pagination-by-number on the front page.

  

  The WP-Pagenavi plugin doesn’t work with single post pages. Darren needs to revert to using the previous_post_link() and next_post_link() functions for the single.php file.

• Also on individual post pages, the text-area for the comment form is too wide. In Firefox, that’s not a big problem. But in Internet Explorer, here’s how Problogger comment form looks:

  

  Where is the box where you type in the comment? It’s at the bottom of the page. That’s what happens in Internet Explorer if your text-area or comment box is too wide.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Although the Problogger theme follows WordPress’s structure, which is pretty good, SEO-wise, Problogger isn’t optimized for search engines (specifically Google).

• For one thing, you want to use only one set of H1 tags. And, you want those H1 tags to wrap around the title of your page or blog. Problogger has mutliple sets of H1 tags. And each set wraps around… a date?

  

  That’s exactly how you should not use H1 tags.

• Second, Problogger’s sidebar content and practically everything else come before the main content. Ideally, you want the search engines to pick up the main content before the sidebar or anything else. This can be fixed by using CSS.
  • Make the sidebar column come after the main column, in the source codes.
  • Use CSS to make the main column and sidebar float right, instead of float left. Or, simply make the sidebar float left without applying the float property to the main column.
  • On the outside, you’ll see no difference. But now you have a left sidebar that comes after the main content. You’ll see a left sidebar. But to search engines, it’s now a right sidebar.

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