Rethinking weblog structures and design

Tomorrow, 24 July, marks the one-year anniversary of when I first started my primary blog on TypePad. I actually started blogging in December 2002, with a BlogSpot blog, but it wasn’t until a year ago that I really got into gear, so to speak, and became a regular blogger.

In January, I made a major design change to the main blog and started this blog, where you’re reading this post. The design on the main blog has been in its current form since then.

When Six Apart upgraded the TypePad service earlier this month and included a raft of new design templates and themes, that got me thinking again about the look-and-feel of both of my blogs and is it to time to change. So with this blog, I applied one of the new designs (the Powell Street 2-column left template) which is what you see today.

I didn’t apply any of the new designs to my primary blog. The main reason is that the blog currently uses a customized version of a standard 3-column template which I’ve changed quite a bit. So applying one of the new design templates would mean that I’d need to spend quite a bit of time in customizing that, and doing it on the live blog.

While I’m quite willing to spend time on customizing, the idea caused me to think more about getting direct access to the template HTML code and creating something a bit more unique from the design and layout points of view.

My service level on TypePad is TypePad Plus. To get direct access to the template code, I’d need to upgrade to TypePad Pro (here’s the comparison chart of all three TypePad service levels). So I’ve been thinking about that quite seriously. My paid TypePad subscription still has another year to run so I’d just need to pay the difference in cost between Plus and Pro (about $60 for the year).

But is getting access to the HTML code a good enough reason to upgrade? That would be the prime reason for doing it. Yes, I’d also be able to have an unlimited number of blogs plus add multiple authors, but I don’t have much need for that right now.

So is upgrading to Pro what I need to do? If I did, I’d look closely at editing CSS not HTML. For that I’ll need a CSS editor (the one I’ve been thinking about is Top Style, created by Nick Bradbury who is also the creator of the FeedDemon RSS aggregator for Windows). I’m very comfortable with the idea of CSS editing (heck, I wrote my first HTML pages way back in 1993) so coding a site doesn’t give me major concerns (well, apart from the time commitment to do it).

This all raises a bigger question for me, though.

If I am going to make such a move, should I really be considering a self-hosted solution? That is, either installing my own server or subscribing to a server hosting service and using a tool like Movable Type (I have a copy as I’m a member of the Six Apart Pro network) or WordPress?

I don’t think self-hosting is a viable option for me so a hosted server solution is what I’d be considering.

There’s another consideration, too. Visitor traffic to my main blog is steadily increasing to the extent that I’m now consistently exceeding my monthly bandwidth allowance with TypePad. For instance, looking just now I see that actual bandwidth usage so far this month is over 7 gigabytes (the allowance is 5) with the projected usage by month’s end at 9.6 gigs. This percentage of excess usage (nearly double the allowance) has been going on for the past five months. So I might be hearing from TypePad about upgrading anyway

I’m getting different suggestions from friends with no clear majority recommendations. If you have any suggestions as I continue to think this through, I’d greatly appreciate hearing them.