While I was in search for a fresh theme for my blog, I glanced through many blog designs for examples (real blogs), and observed some new trends in blog design, which are intended to introduce the WOW factor among their dear readers. If you plan to get a custom theme or if you’re building a new cutting-edge theme yourselves, you may want to include these as well. Let’s have a look at some of ‘em.

• No: of Subscribers turned into text format instead of the traditional chicklet-display Quite a few blogs’ve started showing off their subscriber count as TEXT, rather than the animated CHICKLET display. This ensures maximum integration with your design and provides integrity to the same.Examples of displaying Subscriber-Count as text
  

  Subscriber Count as text

The traditional chicklet display :
You can have something similar to these, with this plugin.

• Custom Tweet Display Twitter has been phenomenal this year, with a growth rate of 600% compared to last year, and the probability that a blogger doesn’t tweet is 0.1237 ( keep it a secret !! ). While Twitter offers you badges to display your tweets anywhere on web, it would be nothing other than awesomeness, if you could show your tweets in a sophisticated or funky way like the ones given below :
  

  Giving a custom styling to display your twitter updates on your own blog in a funky way

  

  Creating a dedicated page for your Twitter Profile

• Promotion of popular/best posts through graphics on sidebar
  

  

  Promoting Popular Posts

• Increased spacing between lines A notable increase in the space between lines, in a paragraph have been advocated by many in their blog designs. This is a proof that blogs value their readers very much and always strive to provide them with a mesmerizing experience.

• Horizontal-aligned-comment field. This trend has been noted in some new themes and almost all premium themes. Conventionally, the comment section of a wordpress blog is set to 3 one-below-another parts
  1. Name
  2. E-Mail
  3. URL

  These 3 fields, which were on separate lines, are now being placed in a single row/line.
  
  This is certainly better than the conventional style, as it adds sleekness and I wonder whether this has been implemented in the coming major release of WordPress, 2.7

• Dynamic FooterDynamic footers like the one I’ve got here on my blog have been the favorite feature of many. This is not really a ‘new’ trend but is worth mentioning here.

Well, these wow-generating-features are the ones that struck me the most, when I sailed (wasn’t surfing, as I had to take a deeper look !) through newly designed blogs. Have you noticed some other feature/style that’s been showing rising interest ?

Thankfully, the spark for hitting the ‘publish’ button for this post, was sufficiently provided by Blog Design Studio with their Blog Design Group Writing Project, which has got a free custom wordpress theme, A free premium theme from Daily Blog Tips and blog consultation by Blogging Tips as the motivating rewards. This is not just a contest, but a Group Writing Project. And I hope, I’ve constructively contributed to the project by showcasing the new trends in blog design that imparts the WOW-Factor in the readers.

“A 90-seconds-long video that too 14400 seconds in the making, which covers 201600 seconds of ACTION”

Analyses how the social media, like Twitter and blogs, did a fantastic job with the Mumbai Terrorist Attack/War on Mumbai. The name “Hash Mumbai” is inspired from the hashtag : “#mumbai” which kept the world buzzing for 59:30 hours.

The documentary is based on Real Time Citizen Journalism in Mumbai Terrorist Attacks by Mr. Gaurav Mishra. Voice your opinions on possibly the longest-ever-terror-attack and “Hash Mumbai”, my contribution to the nation.

You are encouraged to share on or embed on your blog/webpage/social networks.

It’s that time of the year again. With Christmas around the corner (with about two fortnights to go, at the time of writing), people all around the world have started their preparations to have a sparkling and enchanting Christmas, this time. I’ve got the spirit brimming inside me and I want to share with my dear, YOU.

Here, I share chilling-cool downloads of Christmas Wallpapers, Christmas Themes, Christmas Apps and Christmas Music to sooth your eyes, ears and ultimately your beautiful mind. This post is divided into the following sections.

1. 15 Christmas Wallpapers
2. Christmas Themes (for Windows, Sony Ericsson Phones, Firefox etc.)
3. Christmas Downloads (like Desktop Christmas Trees, Free Christmas Games)
4. and cool Christmas Music

15 Awesome Christmas Wallpapers to Dress up your desk/lap

Christmas Themes for your computer and cell phone (SE);
Spread the spirit !

• Wow. Nirmal T.V. has compiled Top 7 Christmas Themes for Windows XP. You may visit the post to download 7 Top Free Christmas Themes for Windows XP

• Free Christmas themes For Your Sony Ericsson Phone

• Free Nice Christmas Theme For Firefox (all versions)

Tinseltown

Tinseltown is a Christmas theme with holiday imagery including Christmas lights, snow, reindeer, presents and more. This theme is made eve better with great Christmas icons from Watiworks and a semi-transparent URL bar. Get in the holiday spirit!

Free Christmas Downloads to enhance your experience

1. Animated FREE Christmas Tree for Windows Desktops
   (Thanks to Keith Dsouza of Techie-Buzz)
2. FREE Christmas Game : Christmas Tree Light Up - 1.1
   It’s a game, where you connect wires and bulbs to the electrical source to light up the Christmas tree. Download this awesome FREE Christmas Game for Windows.

Soothing Christmas Music Recommendations :
Add splendour to the sparkling occassion with cool and engaging Christmas Tunes/Music

1. Check out the Great Christmas Music Recommendations by Grace P.J.
2. Listen to the Greatest Christmas Music Hits for FREE at Last.fm

Web has been evolving continuously over the years and seems to do that in an increased pace, recently. We saw many niches arising and many getting ditched, but there are some which still shines. Add to this, the niche of lists or compilations. This essentially means, writing out posts that will be like “X Hottest Y”, “The Best Z in the world” and so on. Though, it might seem easy, as the content isn’t to be uniquely created, truth be told, it’s challenging than that. Think of publishing a 15/25 item compilation every couple of days !!

The practice or ART of compilation has been around for sometime now, though. But, these were limited to tech items. Called as list-posts by bloggers, these have proved to be killer resources of traffic. Posts like these, easily climbs up social media rankings.
We saw a deviation from the regular tech-list-posts, when two of the world’s best compilers, Smashing Magazine and Hongkiat started showcasing/compiling frequent posts featuring great designs, free design downloads and design examples. The scintillating success of these and those like these, prompted the web to explore interesting-other categories and to present them as professional compilations for their readers.

With that said, let me talk about a promising and exciting new entry to this niche : Damn Good Lists by Keith Dsouza of Techie-Buzz. Damn Good Lists have been launched just this week, and have already proved to be an immense success (which was very well expected). DGL features posts like 15-weirdest-fear-factor-dares and hot and sensational stuff, too. Damn Good Lists will clearly get ahead of any competition. with it’s excellent selection of domain name. The domain in intself, is a much-searched-keyword, which will put it up in first page (98% chance of being the first result) in Search Results. That said and counting in the social media sites, Keith could be sure of another shining success with DGL, as he’ve done with Techie-Buzz. I suggest that you subscribe to their feed so as not to miss anything sweet and hot.

P.S. Saad Hamid of Sizlopedia.com have recently launched ListPhobia, a portal dedicated to cool & hot lists.

Let me introduce to you all, Binny V.A. a serial coder. He is a Freelance Web Developer on the LAMP Platform. We met each other at BlogCampKerala and are expected to meet again at the BarCampKerala3 this December.

Here, I announce that he’s on a plugin release rampage. He’s celebrating this week as “Wordpress Plugin Release Week” and is gonna’ release a total of 5(minimum) amazingly useful wordpress plugins in 5 days, one each day. You might’ve heard and talked about many wordpress gurus, and here’s one from India, to be precise, Kerala. The awesomeness of his coding skills are evident from his insanely-useful and out-of-the-box plugins like the ones featured below.

Eventr plugin lets you use your blog as an event management tool. You can create an event - the plugin will let people sign up for the event - it can also show a list of all the attendees. Once the event is done, you can deactivate the event and no more sign ups will be allowed.

AutoFields Plugin will auto fill the Excerpt and add an Image custom field based on the data you entered into the contents editor.

Pollin wordpress plugin will let you add polls to your blog. It can be shown to your visitors who will be able to vote in the poll. You can add the poll in a post by including the HTML comment <!– POLLIN 1 –> in the post. Here 1 is the ID of the poll to be shown.

There are many more rocking wordpress plugins in his archive. Go visit them and make the most use of them. I suggest that you subscribe to his blog so as to make sure that you don’t miss another cool release from him.

Two weeks back, Innoz, a startup by 4 youngsters, launched their first product in BETA : SMSGyan. It gives you any information you need, sent to your mobile phone, upon sending an sms to the system.

The Format for using the FREE (standard sms rates apply) service is:
GYAN<space>SearchTerm/Keyword to +91 989 597 4926

Within 10 seconds, you’ll receive an sms with the information you requested. Sounds awesome, huh ? It indeed is. They provides the information from Wikipedia, which is transformed into mobile friendly formatting by removing the text inside brackets and such.

The system also features a Dictionary. The Format for using the dictionary is:
GYAN<space>D<space>TheWord

• Watch the animation on how to use SMSGyan

Pretty useful and nifty service that proves to be a time-saver and at times, a life-saver ! The founders of this startup, Innoz, are in their very-early-twenties which promises us that we’ll see more from them down the road. Wishing all the success to the guys over at Innoz. They’re planning to have the official launch of the stable version soon.

I’m so happy and excited to see the new design in perfect action. It reflects the freshness, which my tag line carries with. This theme is designed by Blog Design Studio, which is partnered by a good friend of mine, Mayank Gupta and was released as a free theme by Blogging Tips by Kevin Muldoon.

Those two are indeed my favorite features of the new design. I longed for a dynamic footer for some time now and was joyful to watch that the twitter badge blended smoothly with the design. Then, there is the vibrant social media section, which I love the most. This was the work, which gave me the most satisfaction. The HeartSocialIcons are from SmashingMagazine which are designed by TheDesignSuperHero.

I’ve rewritten the Contact/Consult page and the About page. Consult ? Yes. With the experience I’ve gained all through these months, I’m confident and determined to offer consultancy/general help regarding web, absolutely FREE. All you’ve to do is head over to the Consult page and shoot a message. You could be 100% sure that you’ll receive a personal reply from me. (I’m not a guy who get sank in a flooded inbox !)

I suggest you to have a look around and note where things are placed in the new design ! And I’m sure you’ve got something to say about the new design. Do it in the comments. Your comments mean a lot to me.