Remarkablogger

This post is the fifth and last in a series of 5 free quick blog reviews worth a total of $500 that I’m giving away to promote my blog consultancy. First review: Caroline Middlebrook, Livin Online.

Theme Playground

First Impressions

Ryan Imel blogs about WordPress and theme design at the wonderfully named Theme Playground. Ryan and I are acquaintances (I guess you could use the term “internet friends”), and I already respect his writing and his design chops, which makes this review the most challenging one out of the five I’m doing for this promotion. However, I’m quite used to helping family and friends with blog design and direction issues without having them kill me, so I think I’ll be able to deliver some value for Ryan on this one.

Theme Playground uses the “magazine” style WordPress theme The Morning After, which is a wonderful theme — one of the best ones I’ve ever seen, in fact. But I’m still surprised that Ryan would use someone else’s theme and not design his own. When I compared The Morning After to Theme Playground, I realized that little customization of the theme has been done. I may be guilty of thinking like me, but making it my own would’ve been the first thing I would have done with it. A different color scheme or changing some fonts would individualize it more. I can see why he chose it: it’s got wonderful features like latest post, featured post, and a hundred other nice touches.

There are a couple technical points I need to bring up. Ryan has added an author picture to the About box on the home page, which is something I always recommend, but the width of the picture is different than the width of the caption below it, so it looks off-kilter. The second point is that there is a database error showing for most popular posts within a category on the category archive pages. Oops!

The last thing I want to mention about my first impressions of Theme Playground has to do with the logo and with the previous theme that was used before The Morning After. The previous design featured a playground slide image as the logo. It also had an unusual color scheme of tan text against a dark brown background. I’m glad of the dark text on a white background, but I have to confess I’m not feeling the new logo. The playground slide communicated the idea of fun and playfulness. The letters TP only makes me think of toilet paper.

If there is one thing I have never liked in logo design, it is when a designer falls back on creating the logo out of the initials of the company. Yes, it looks nice, but there should be more to it than just looking nice. TP in a green circle doesn’t invoke or communicate any ideas or concepts about Theme Playground, and to my thinking, that is what a logo should do.

Content and Purpose

Ryan knows what Theme Playground is about where content, categories, and purpose are concerned, and that’s a change from most of the other blogs I’ve reviewed for this promotion, where content and purpose needed some thinking. Ryan is an experienced blogger and writes well. He does WordPress and blog consulting, and his writing showcases his knowledge and experience as it should. He has a talent for writing posts about a topic that seems obvious at first… but then you realize you haven’t seen it anywhere else!

One solid suggestion I can make for Ryan would be to include some posts that let us peek into how he works with his consulting clients and what the results of that are. This will further help to build trust in the minds of potential clients. Success stories and case study-type posts occasionally are not a hard sell, which would be a bad idea on a blog. Demonstrating technical expertise is one thing, demonstrating that you can work with people, communicate, and complete projects on time is another (and very valuable).

Finally, I would suggest he consider doing videos, especially narrated screencast theme reviews. I know video is the current bandwagon to jump on, but there is a very good reason for that: its time has come. Video is now cheaper and easier than ever before to do and do well. Something to think about.

Recommendations

• Maybe a different color scheme
• Different icons
• Perhaps different typography
• Different background images for the horizontal grayscale photos
• New logo that communicates what Theme Playground is all about and offers more unique opportunities for branding.
• Fix layout/CSS issues with the author picture and caption and the problem with the category popular posts.
• Bring the consulting a little more out from the background: let people see how you work and what your results are.
• Consider doing some screencasts and video posts.

Ryan, I hope there are some valuable take-aways for you from this review. Theme Playground is a great blog and I look forward to its very bright future!

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