Building a Better Blog From Design To Code: Part 1 - Planning And Needs

on Tue May 13 22:27:27 GMT 2008 in Webmaster Articles and viewed 5385 times

There comes a time in everyone’s life when they decide to put up a blog. I’ve covered different designs before, I’ve covered some different coding approaches, but I’ve always left it to you to put together. It’s time to solve the problem. I will teach you and ask you questions about what you want in a blog, how to do it, and when to do it. You’ll learn various CSS, PHP, HTML, and AJAX techniques in this 4 part tutorial.


Overview

  1. Introduction
  2. Planning Design and Usability
  3. Planning Backend
  4. Planning Extensions
  5. Conclusion

Now you know what you’re in for.

Introduction

A Blog. Web log. What is it and what do you need in it? The common idea of a blog is simply an online journal. A log of events. But now it’s become so much more, with so many new ideas. Your blog could be personal, professional, about a topic, about your life, about nothing at all (in many cases). But there’s some things that are very common in blogs, and some things that are not so common in blogs. But here you’ll learn everything about everything you’d ever want to know.

Planning Design

The design for blogs now can be varied. For now I’d like to stay with a very nice design that can easily pass for a professional or personal blog. You’ll learn how to make a great two column, fixed-width layout that looks great. Along the way there’ll be some Photoshop tips for easy one minute images that can add worlds to your designs. You’ll learn exactly how to structure your design so your visitor will be able to read your content and not strain for it. You’ll learn about color blending and font faces. Everything.

The design will include a header, left and right side, and footer. There will be spaces to add navigation, and to extend your design from within your backend, which will add to your skills as a programmer and a designer. The whole design is meant to be lean, clean, and great looking.

Usability

A subset of design and something important to consider is usability. Here you’ll also learn exactly how to direct your visitor to what they want to see, to keep them at your website, and help them find everything perfect. After all, you wouldn’t want to lose anyone. And along with this you’ll learn about how to structure your pages for better search engine spiderability.

Planning Backend

The backend will be a big part of the blog. Not only will you be able to add and manage your posts, you’ll create a custom text formatter, customize settings, add an authorization system, add sidebar elements, RSS options and management, and much more. This will be a huge project and you’ll learn much. This will all be done in PHP, but there might be a Ruby on Rails version in the future. And don’t worry: there won’t be any object oriented madness this time around like my last few tutorials. But I’m not promising this totally I hope…

Extensions!

One of the great things about blogs now is the Web 2.0 trend including AJAX. So for the fourth part of the tutorial (third part of actually doing something) will be extending it and adding AJAX. This could be anything from a live search to instantly deleting posts, to some kind of drag and drop feature. You’ll have to wait until this part, but believe me, it’ll be worth it.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this should be my biggest series of tutorials and you’ll hopefully learn the most. As of the time of writing I’ve got the design done, and have much planned for both the backend and the extensions, and possibly even more tweaks to the design. But trust me. Before two weeks are over, you’ll have the best series of tutorials to build a great content management system and blog. You’ll be the envy of all your friends, and you’ll know how to do just about anything content management related in PHP, anything blog related with CSS, and too much AJAX information.