Thinking about the look and feel of this new blog, one thing that was in my mind from early on was that I would create a new presence that is more geared to RSS than to a traditional site on the web.

My own online reading habits have changed dramatically over the past year as RSS has been taken up by more and more sites on the web, not just blogs. Rarely do I visit websites when I subscribe to a particular site’s feed. Indeed, about the only time I do is to leave a comment to a post or an article.

I’m certain that this habit will grow as more people realize the efficiency and convenience of aggregating news and information from multiple places in one place on your desktop, and as more sites offer RSS feeds.

It’s clear that the look and feel of a site assumes less importance when people don’t need to visit it in order to read what you have to say.

So this new blog will have far less by way of fancy design elements and street furniture, so to speak, than its predecessor, NevOn. No distracting clutter in the sidebar, thus enabling a visitor to focus on the prime content, ie, the posts.

I had considered hiring a professional weblog designer, someone skilled in creating bespoke WordPress themes. But no, I’m not doing that. Instead, I’ve taken the excellent K2 WordPress theme, the latest version for WordPress 2.x, and added some light (so far) customizations to the code to tailor the blog a bit to my own design wishes. I’m happy with it so far.

WordPress also enables me to create pages outside the blog structure itself but still integrated within the overall site. That’s a very useful feature. These pages are typically the ones you’d access through the menu links at the top of each page, just below the banner image.

Still, I am aware that the whole world doesn’t yet know about RSS, and many people still prefer to physically go to a site. So this new site of mine will present a pleasing appearance and provide visitors with a place where they can easily find what they’re looking for.

That’s Plan A. Tell me if you think I need a Plan B…