It’s been two years now since the start of the Last Appetite, so I’m beginning to consider putting together a new design. The choice is between building/modifying a new one from a free food blog template myself or having a template built bespoke. Either way, the process involves me trawling through the best templates out there and deciding whether I need to hire a designer.
Here is a selection of my 10 favorite finds for food blog templates so far. Any preferences?
Magazine-style templates
As you can probably tell from my current template, I’m a fan of the magazine-style template and using images to steer traffic around the site rather than just links alone.
The Unstandard – This is my current theme
Three Column Templates
Ascii One – Almost pure typography as theme
Experimental
Viewport – This template is a side-scrolling set of posts. Very graphic heavy.
Of these i think I’d go with Overstand (with a bit of tweaking, of course). But Viewport is kinda cool though too — I quite like some of the side-scrolling things I’ve seen around.
I like overstand or newsmag. But please, no black background.
I’ve been thinking of buying Thesis, which is by the same designer as my current template, but it would involved learning how to drive “wp hooks” and I don’t know if I can sink the time into it.
I’d avoid any that are white out of black.
I’ve been doing useability testing lately for some other projects and there is a real age divide with white backgrounds vs dark – under twenties tend to respond better to darker backgrounds, older cohorts to white. My theory is that it’s MySpace’s fault, but have nothing to back that up
I’d still go with white/light because I feel like photos look better against it. Maybe I’m showing my age.
I like the clarity of Overstand and Ascii One. I agree with text on white even though most people will be receiving content through a reader.
I like the column-based ones! But I read via an RSS reader and so end up on the article pages and skip the front page anyway.
If it is possible to tweak the existing template such that it would allow for the incorporation of byline text within the images on the home page, that might be nice.
Definitely retain the white background, those young people shouldn’t be on your lawn.
Great suggestions for templates. I have recently started my blog (www.winemuse.com.au) and have used atahualpa theme on WordPress. I wanted a really clean design and having had no experience, I quickly came to appreciate just how easy it was to modify this theme.
I definitely agree with the white background being easier on the eye. A darker background tends to make photos look great it does get very distracting, overall readability will come back to traditional light background.