Different websites cater to different audiences. A technical blog like this one is targeted to readers who are here for the quick and dirty. They want to know stuff and aren’t interested in being wowed by design or medium. Photography and music sites however are different, their target audience is different, and as such, need a more stylized, visually interesting website.

All websites need to be, first and foremost, functional. They need to meet the need of their target audience. Meeting the need of the audience is the biggest aspect to think about when adding any design element, widget, plugin, etc. Do my readers NEED this? If not, cut it.

I just finished up designing a new flex-width wordpress theme for a client. It was an interesting challenge and I’m still not 100% satisfied with the header because, while on average widths it looks good, the wider someone sets their resolution or the wider their screen the more whitespace is in the header. The rest of the content does a beautiful job of filling space across the page but when designing a header, particularly one with images it gets harder to deal with flexibility.

My own blog has a fixed width although, with a little tinkering I could make it flexible. In this case I actually prefer the fixed width, the whitespace either side rests my eyes from the ‘color’ of the rest of the site and the header and footer maintain an aesthetically pleasing balance.

In the end, each website has different needs, each client has different preferences, and no single site suits everyone. The opportunity to have such a diverse range of designs is one of the things that make modern internet so interesting. Anyone dating back to the late 80′s early 90′s might remember, things have looked a lot worse. lol

Speaking of plugins that fill a need, have you considered adding the ‘subscribe to comments’ WordPress plugin? I’m one user who appreciates the added ease of keeping track with such a nifty little tool.

I think for most people, they start out with a downloaded template and then modify that until they are happy. Once they modified a pre-built template, they may have more knowledge and build their own from scratch. That worked for me.

With regular HTML it’s fine, basic tables, etc. What are people’s recommendations for creating your own template?