Here is a look at 11 things you can do to improve a blog theme without going the re-design route.

1. Improve the Look of the Sidebar

Although the sidebar will never be the focal point of a blog theme, a well-designed sidebar can have a huge impact on the overall look of a theme. Sometimes when designing a blog theme the sidebar doesn’t get much consideration, especially when it comes to visual appeal. Sidebars are generally there for purposes of navigation and helping the visitor find something useful and relevant. While this is an important aspect of a sidebar, it can still accomplish these things with some visual appeal.

Several months ago I wrote a post, Effective Use of Blog Sidebars, that focused on the needed functionality and also showcased some well-designed and effective sidebars. If your sidebar is functional but lacking in aesthetics, this is an area for potential improvement.

For further research, here are some useful tutorials:

• Enhanced Sidebars with Dynamic Content
• Customizing Your Sidebar
• WordPress Theme Hacks

2. Improve the Usefulness of Your Sidebar

As I mentioned in the previous point, sidebars should be well-designed and helpful to visitors. If the design and appearance of your sidebar is fine, take a look at ways to improve the usefulness. Often, blog theme designers get into the habit of adding certain things to a sidebar and wind up doing so without even considering if it will be useful to visitors.

One of the primary purposes of a sidebar is to improve the navigation and usability of the blog, so try to find ways to improve in this area. If you have manually created links and lists in your sidebar, make an effort to update them from time-to-time so quality posts aren’t falling through the cracks.

3. Work on Comment Design

Like the sidebar, the comment area of a blog theme is often very basic and standard. Some blog theme designers have done an excellent job of setting their themes apart from the crowd by designing beautiful comment areas. For WordPress users, there are plenty of opportunities to tweak and style comments to your desire (see Top 10 Tutorials for Working with WordPress Comments).

A growing number of blogs are enhancing the comment area by adding avatars to give a more personal feel to the comments and to encourage discussion (see Avatars in Blog Comment Design). Comment design is a great option if you want to spend some time improving the look of your blog without re-designing the entire theme.

4. Re-Design the Logo

The logo or branding area of a blog has a huge impact on the overall look. By re-designing the logo you may be able to achieve big improvements without dedicated the same amount of time that would be needed for a complete theme overhaul.

logos, of course, have major implications on branding, so be careful before re-designing the logo that it will take your blog in a positive direction rather than actually harming the blog through a loss of brand recognition. For smaller blogs this is less of an issue.

For logo design inspiration, see Top 10 Sources of Logo Design Inspiration.

5. Re-Design the Footer

Footers rarely get much attention from blog theme designers, but well-designed footers can really stand out (see 25 Impressive Blog Footers and 25 More Inspirational Footers). I know the footers of all of my blogs are in need of some improvement, and I think there are probably other bloggers and designers who could benefit from some time spent in this area as well.

6. Re-Design the Feed Subscription Area

One of the most important factors for a blog’s long-term success is the ability to convert visitors into subscribers. Almost all blogs have an area (generally at the top of a sidebar) to encourage subscriptions. Feed icons are very common here, for recognition purposes, and often there will be a one-field form that can be completed to subscribe by email.

Since this area of the theme design is critical to attracting interest and encouraging visitors to subscribe, it’s possible to make subtle, but powerful, improvements to the theme just by changing this area. Some blog designers get creative with icons and graphics in this area, and other’s keep it simple.

7. Improve the Readability of Posts

The theme designer has an impact on the blogger and the reader in terms of the styling of post content. While the theme design can’t control certain readability issues like paragraph length, use of bold text and use of lists, the designer can drastically improve readability with effective use of h3 and h4 tags, proper whitespace around the content, line spacing, and styling of blockquotes.

Just by making some changes to the stylesheet you can make serious improvements in this area. This is a great area for experimentation as styles to sub headers and other items can easily be changed and tweaked any time.

For more information, see 30 Ways to Improve Blog Readability by Pro Blog Design.

8. Add Something New

Many blogs are adding non-traditional blog elements to provide something new and interesting for visitors. For example, DesignM.ag, and many other web design blogs, uses a community news section to share recent headlines with readers from the sidebar. Other blogs have their own Flickr groups that display recent additions in the sidebar. Even posting you Twitter updates on your blog can spice things up a little bit.

9. Make Changes to the Color Scheme

If a complete re-design isn’t wanted or needed, but you want to make noticeable and significant changes, consider changing up the color scheme. Changes in this area could be relatively minor, or it could be a completely new color scheme. Colors can make or break a theme design, so if you’re looking for some improvements this could be an area for experimentation.

There are plenty of great online resources for working with color, so rather than trying to list them I’ll direct you to David Airey’s Colour Tools, Palettes, Schemes and Theories.

10. Improve the Main Navigation

Earlier we talked about improving the usefulness of a sidebar by creating better navigation, but this can also apply to the primary navigation of the site. It’s possible to new pages or sections have been added to the blog that could be added to the navigation menu, or some of those items in the main navigation may not be necessary and could be improved.

Most blogs already have navigation menus that include links to all the major pages on the site, but visual appeal and design is another area of possible improvement regarding navigation menus. Navigation is often one of the most noticeable and significant aspects of the design (see 50+ Gorgeous Navigation Menus and  50 Gorgeous Navigation Menus – Part II for inspiration). A more attractive menu could make big improvements to a theme overall.

11. Add Image Styles

Most blogs frequently use images inside of posts. There are any numer of ways that images can be styled to improve the look of the post. Many blogs use some padding and borders, but there are plenty of options here. You can do some experimentation to see what you like, and even create multiple styles and classes if you want to have options for future posts.

Tutorials:

Build a Featured Posts Section for WordPress

Magazine themes are becoming increasingly popular. There are plenty of quality premium themes available, and also some decent free magazine themes, but you may want to build or customize your own. This tutorial covers the process of coding the index.php file to set up a magazine-style front page with a featured post section.

WordPress Sidebar Turned Apple-Flashy Using jQuery UI

Sidebars are often pretty boring. If you’re looking to improve yours, this tutorial goes through the process of using jQuery that expands and reacts to user actions, similar to the Apple sidebar.

How to Make a Featured Post Carousel for WordPress

This tutorial will show you a different approach to displaying featured content. The technique is fairly simple, and can easily be applied to any blog that wants to give more exposure to certain content. This only requires a few coding changes to get the featured content in the carousel.

Building a Better Blogroll: Dynamic Fun with SimplePie and jQuery

This tutorial from Chris Coyier is not exclusively for WordPress, but this could easily the sidebar for many WordPress users. Blogrolls are common sidebar features, but with this tutorial Chris shows how the traditional blogroll can be taken a step further by bringing in feeds from other sites and blogs using SimplePie and jQuery. This technique is especially useful for those who run multiple blogs or a network.

Dynamic Highlight Menu

Nick La of Web Designer Wall has a post with a number of WordPress hacks, one of them being the dynamic highlight menu. Nick shows his approach for creating the navigation menu at Best Web Gallery that highlights the current location for visitors.

Two-Tiered Conditional Navigation

In this tutorial Darren Hoyt provides the code for creating a WordPress navigation menu that shows both parent pages and the relevant child pages. For sites and blogs that have a lot of content and pages, this trick can help to improve user experience.

WordPress Custom Fields: Laying Text Over Your Lead Graphic

WordPress’s custom fields open up endless possibilities for theme developers and bloggers.  In this tutorial you’ll learn how to use custom fields to display an image for a post with text laying on top of it.

“Magazine-Style” Horizontal Dropdown Menu

Jean-Baptiste Jung shows another technique for improving the navigation of a WordPress site. The horizontal dropdown menu uses categories and sub-categories to create a magazine-style nav menu.

Integrate a Slideshow into Your WordPress Theme

Smooth Gallery is a MooTools gallery that can add some sizzle to a website. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to integrate Smooth Gallery with WordPress.

Adding Tabs to Your Blog Sidebar

If you’d like to improve your sidebar by adding some tabbed content/navigation areas, this tutorial covers the process of using Yahoo! TabView in your WordPress sidebar.

Create a “Send This to Twitter” Button

As Twitter continues to increase in popularity, integrating Twitter and WordPress will likely continue to become more common. This post isn’t really a tutorial, but it does give the code that you need to add a “send this to Twitter” link or button to your WordPress blog.

Plugins:

J Post Slider Plugin

With the J Post Slider Plugin gives WordPress users an easy way to add an attractive image slide show that can be controlled from the admin panel.

Lightview for WordPress

Lightview is similar to Lightbox. However, Lightview also works with videos and iframed web pages in addition to photos.

NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option.

Advanced Category Excluder

Advanced Category Excluder allows WordPress users to easily have CMS-like control over which content appears on the front page, in RSS feeds, archives and more.

Event Calendar 3

With Events Calendar 3 you can manage future events as an online calendar. Display upcoming events in a dynamic calendar, on a listings page, or as a list in the sidebar.

WP e-Commerce

WP e-Commerce is a highly useful plugin for bloggers or website owners who want to sell products from their site without a lot of work to set up an e-commerce site.

TDO Mini Forms

With TDO Mini Forms you can allow users to submit posts by completing a form. The posts are held in moderation until you choose to publish them.

FV Community News Plugin

Community news sections are popular among design blogs. This plugin will make it easy to accept and publish user submissions. There are a lot of options and control for the site owner or administrator.

Yoast Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumb navigation can be helpful for usability and SEO purposes. This plugin allows you to easily add plugins to your WordPress theme.

In this article we’ll take a look at a combination of tutorials, plugins and themes that can help you to use WordPress in non-traditional ways. Hopefully you’ll find something that you can use, or at least something that will be a valuable learning resource for extending your knowledge and skills of working with WordPress.

1. Membership Directory

Last year Chris Cagle wrote a tutorial, How to Use WordPress as Membership Directory, at WPDesigner. Chris uses WordPress to power his directory, Pittsburgh Designers. The tutorial uses a few plugins for users and role management, and the end result is a moderated directory that allows members to enter information about themselves.

Update: Chris has posted a follow up to this tutorial since the release of WP 2.7 – The New and Improved Way to Turn WordPress 2.7 into a Membership Community.

2. Business Directory

The Business Directory Plugin for WordPress accomplishes a similar end result as the tutorial above. The plugin will allow you to create a directory on your website or blog where users can submit information about themselves or their business.

3. Ffffound Clone

Assualt Blog has an interesting tutorial where Tim shows how he built a Ffffound clone on WordPress. Ffffound is a great site for inspiration, and a sort of image bookmarking service for those who have access. Tim shows that WordPress can be used to build your own personal version, and he even has a working finished product, VNovember, that you can check out. The tutorial shows you how to set up the theme that Tim developed, which plugins to install, and how to make it all work.

4. Job Board

Niche job boards are now pretty common, especially in the design and development industry. The design job board here on DesignM.ag is using a great premium WordPress plugin called WPJobAds to power the job board. You could, of course, build this type of functionality into WordPress manually if you had the time and desire, but WPJobAds makes the process easier.

RecruitPress is a fee job board option. It is not a plugin, but rather a group of plugins and some core file modification that you install on top of WordPress.

I highly recommend that you do NOT buy the JobPress premium WordPress theme. I bought it, it didn’t work out of the box, and I got no response to my emails for support. The owners seemed to disappear as their site went down for an extended period, but it looks like it’s back now.

BlueFur also has a job board script that can be downloaded and used for your own job board. It’s more labor intensive than WPJobAds, but it is free.

5. Techmeme News Clone

Raj Dash wrote an article for Performancing that covers the process of using WordPress to build a “Techmeme River of News Clone.” This approach will not allow you to duplicate exactly what Techmeme does, but it is a cool idea that could be used in a variety of different scenarios.

In the article, Raj refers to a tutorial on Devlounge for mashing up feeds with Yahoo! Pipes. This is what Raj uses to create the river of news (a stream of headlines from a selection of blogs).

6. Email Newsletter

One of the older articles on NETTUTS is Build a ‘WordBurner’ Email Newsletter Manager Using WordPress and FeedBurner. WordPress and FeedBurner are obviously used together by thousands of bloggers, but in this tutorial you’ll learn how to create an email-only newsletter with content that does not show up on the front page of the blog.  The tutorial shows the manual process for “hiding” the newsletter category on the blog, but you could also achieve the same thing with the Advanced Category Excluder plugin if you don’t want to deal with the code.

7. Forums

While there are a number of options for hosting a forum on your site, it’s also possible to use WordPress. TheDeadOne.net offers the TDO Forum WordPress Theme. The theme will give you forum functionality, although you’ll most likely want to customize the design in some way. (Note: It only claims to be tested through WordPress 2.5).

8. Contact Manager

It’s also possible to use WordPress as your own contact manager. The WP Contact Manager Theme was developed for this purpose. It is a free theme that makes the blog a functional contact manager that can be extended further with some free plugins.

WP-CRM is another theme for turning WordPress into a contact manager. With WP-CRM you can add contacts and notes from the front end of WordPress without being in the admin dashboard.

9. Wiki

WordPress Wiki is a premium theme ($30) available at ThemeForest. This theme makes it easy to use WordPress for your own wiki. As expected, it’s not as robust as some other options, but it’s a great way to add a simple wiki to an existing site without a lot of effort or cost.

10. Review Site

WP Review Site is a premium plugin ($97) that will turn WordPress into a review site where visitors can place their own reviews and rate the listings. It also comes with a WordPress theme and some affiliate marketing tools. WP Review Site can be used as part of another site, or it can be used to set up a site dedicated to reviews.

11. E-Commerce

WP e-Commerce is a surprisingly powerful free plugin that will allow you to sell items through your WordPress-powered site or blog. While WordPress is not intended to compete with platforms that have been developed specifically for e-commerce, this plugin is ideal for bloggers and website owners who want to set up a small store without a lot of effort or expense.

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