$1500 And Upwards For Your Blog Design
I guess I shouldn’t complain about my free, buggy WordPress themes. Although the current (now former as of April 2oth) design has a nice, snowy mountain scene featured in the header, I do 
not like how this design automatically chops off each of my articles by turning them into preview paragraphs. I plan on eventually switching over to a “new” design (Chameleon installed on April 24th — woohoo!), but only after I identify one that is relatively bug free and one that I can live with. Please bear with me as I sort through this process!
On the other hand, I have learned that shelling out $1500 for a unique blog design isn’t all that unusual. In fact, if you get one at that price then you are receiving a relative bargain as some designers are charging $3000 to $5000 per theme.
Yes, on the surface it does sound kind of nuts but Chris Pearson’s, “How Much Should A Design Cost?” on his Pearsonified blog is worth reading to get a better understanding about the blog theme pricing structure. As he mentions, individual blogs generally opt for the lowest costs possible while business blogs willingly shell out the big bucks. And why is that? For one simple reason: companies understand branding very well, therefore “visual appeal” holds a lot of value for them. Plus, all of the unique coding — something site visitors never see — must be added according to what the theme purchaser wants.
You didn’t think that a novice designer would take into consideration your specific needs now, did you?
Yes, I’ll be heading back over to the WordPress parts bin — I mean Codex — to scrounge around for my next theme. I like the various Andreas Viklund themes, but so do millions of other bloggers. Cutline looks cool, but maybe I’ll go the Andy Beard route and simply focus on improving my content.
Well for blogs that’d be dumb, but as you mentioned businesses need to have something different altogether.
I have seen some personal blogs that are well designed just for that individual. On closer inspection (page rank, Alexa, Technorati, etc.) I can see why they shelled out the bucks — they are probably pulling in a significant amount of their money through their blog.
Some day, I hope to be there!
Some of the biggest named bloggers have some really poorly designed themes.
I went for one that has some good SEO characterisits and that I can play with.
Eventually I will mould everything into something a lot nicer looking.
On your front page you just need to change one thing to get what you want.
in index.php look for the_excerpt() and change that to the_content()
Thank you for your help, Andy. I realized that I also needed to add in a “Please Keep Reading Rest Of Entry” designation to the posts and wasn’t sure how to accomplish that task. So, I snagged the three column version of Kubrick and there you have it. I’ll be tweaking this one some more, but it’ll have to do for now.
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