Free Blog Makeover Contest - Act Now!

I want to re/design your blog.

If you own (or are start­ing up) a blog, read care­ful­ly. I’m giv­ing away a free pro­fes­sion­al blog makeover (or ini­tial design, as the case may be).

You know I’m a pro­fes­sion­al graph­ic and web design­er, right? I’ve got over 15 years expe­ri­ence in graph­ic design, and 9 years specif­i­cal­ly in web design. See my port­fo­lio for some recent exam­ples of my work.

Occassionally I do pro bono work. Sometimes its char­i­ty work, some­times its work just because the project piques my inter­est and looks like fun. Right now, I want to design a blog. I’m hap­py with my own blog design for now, and I have no rea­son to start­up anoth­er blog. So, I want to re/design your blog, no strings attached.

DISCLAIMER: This is not an open invi­ta­tion to solic­it my ser­vices fee-free. Nor will I “invest” either my time nor my tal­ent in some­one’s “I’m going to get rich on the web” project. I’ve been turn­ing those down for nine years, with­out excep­tion. And, with­out excep­tion, each such project offered to me has failed to break even, much less turn a prof­it. I do pro-bono work that I choose, and I nev­er choose a project that is deliv­ered to me unsolicited.

Clicked con­tin­ued for the details.

Pariah’s Free Blog Makeover Contest.

I thought of just stick­ing it up here for the first to respond, but that seems unfair. Some peo­ple who read my blog work dur­ing the day or are in parts of the world where the day begins much lat­er. So, to be fair, I’ll make it a contest.

What you get:
A com­plete makeover (hence­forth “makeover” shall include either a redesign of an exist­ing blog or design of a new blog) of your blog, includ­ing the following:

• Main blog (index) template; 
• Single archive tem­plate (which can be used for category- and date-based archives as well as just gen­er­al archive listings); 
• Post/entry page tem­plate (with and, if want­ed, with­out com­ments section); 
• Comments page template; 
• Comments Preview page tem­plate (if wanted); 
• Comments Error page tem­plate (if want­ed), and; 
• All nec­es­sary graph­ics, CSS, etc. for the above.

If, in the above, I’ve for­got­ten any com­mon tem­plates, please do men­tion what I missed in your entry.

How to enter:
Let’s make it an essay con­test. Write me an essay (in English, please) explain­ing why your blog should be the one I re/design. Please include the fol­low­ing, in no par­tic­u­lar order:

• A descrip­tion of your blog and its pur­pose: Why do you have a blog? Why do you blog? Why do you like blog­ging? What aspect of keep­ing a blog is the most reward­ing for you?; 
• A link to your blog’s main page; 
• What blog­ging soft­ware you use (e.g. Movable Type, Greymatter, Blogspot, etc.); 
• For what blog­ging soft­ware you’d like me to design, if that dif­fers from what you cur­rent­ly use; 
• How long you’ve kept a blog; 
• How often you change the design/layout of your blog; 
• Your ideas and thoughts about how you would like your new blog to look–if you have some­thing in mind or have any ideas at all about the future look of your blog, please be as descrip­tive as pos­si­ble, with lots of mean­ing­ful adjec­tives and nouns that will com­mu­ni­cate your vision to me; 
• If you’ve found things you like on oth­er blogs or web­sites, links to them and descrip­tions of what I should be see­ing in them; 
• Your favorite col­ors by any one of the fol­low­ing methods:
  • RGB val­ues (i.e. “I like this red 255,16,21 and this black, 240,255,245”);
  • HEX val­ues (i.e. “I like this red #CC0033 and this black, #330033”);
  • By attach­ing to the e‑mail images show­ing the col­ors, or;
  • If you don’t know specif­i­cal­ly what col­ors you like, give me gen­er­al­iza­tions (i.e. “I like warm col­ors like reds and oranges” or “I pre­fer designs done com­plete­ly in blues”).
• Why you think your blog should be the one I makeover.

Writing tal­ent will not be a fac­tor in my deci­sion. I’ll read for the mean­ing behind the words, not the words themselves.

What hap­pens if you win:
I will give you the same respect and atten­tive­ness as my pay­ing clients. We’ll inter­act by e‑mail, chat, and/or tele­phone. I’ll exam­ine your blog, lis­ten to your ideas, and gen­er­ate an ini­tial sketch, which I will deliv­er to you in PDF form (you’ll need the free Adobe Reader 6 pro­gram installed). Following your approval of the final sketch, I’ll begin cre­at­ing the graph­ics and tem­plates. These may be proofed to you at var­i­ous stages either in PDF form or via a pri­vate web­site on my servers. When fin­ished, I’ll pro­vide the tem­plates, includ­ing all graph­ics, CSS files, and so on for you to install on your site.

Rules:

• By enter­ing Pariah’s Free Blog Makeover Contest con­test you agree to all terms and con­di­tions herein; 
• One entry per blog, not per person–if you main­tain more than one blog, enter each of them separately; 
• One entry per essay–if you wish to enter mul­ti­ple blogs, each must be entered via its own essay; 
• To be fair to the blog­ging com­mu­ni­ty, when you enter your blog, you must men­tion on your blog (if you cur­rent­ly main­tain one) that you’ve entered Pariah’s Free Blog Makeover Contest con­test, and link back to this post; 
• The win­ning designs must main­tain in per­pe­tu­ity a dis­creet cred­it to the design­er (me) on all pages/templates pro­vid­ed by the design­er (the cred­it is small and dis­creet, usu­al­ly con­sist­ing of a few words and/or an 88x31 lin­kl­o­go like the one at right, all hyper­linked to http://​www​.iampariah​.com;
• The con­test is for web design, not programming–I won’t code cus­tom JavaScript, PHP, Perl, etc. appli­ca­tions; I will incor­po­rate into the tem­plates any appli­ca­tions you pro­vide, however; 
• The tem­plates will be designed and cod­ed in English, though your blog need­n’t be writ­ten in English; 
• Any trans­la­tions to lan­guages oth­er than English will need to be pro­vid­ed by the winner; 
• For copy­right and/or trade­mark pur­pos­es, all designs remain the exclu­sive prop­er­ty of Pariah Burke, with the right giv­en to the win­ner to use the designs with­out restric­tion or time lim­it on his or her blog, and; 
• I reserve the right to refuse ser­vice to any­one at any time.

Miscellany:
When I select a win­ner, I will also select two runners-up. Should the win­ner not receive the makeover for any reason–winner changes mind, is dis­qual­i­fied, pass­es away, or for any oth­er reason–the first runner-up will receive the makeover. If the first runner-up does not receive the makeover for some rea­son (see above), then the sec­ond runner-up will be award­ed the prize. If nec­es­sary, I will go back through the entries to find addi­tion­al runners-up, and the award will move down through the line.

I have worked pre­vi­ous­ly with blog­ging soft­ware Movable Type and Greymatter. I have not worked with pMachine, Blogspot, etc., though I’m cer­tain­ly will­ing to try. The only tech­ni­cal require­ments are that your blog­ging software/system use HTML, XHTML, or PHP tem­plates. I don’t know enough about LiveJournal or oth­er appli­ca­tions with which I haven’t worked to know if I can design for them or how much I can mod­i­fy their default lay­outs. The respon­si­bil­i­ty for deter­min­ing that (before enter­ing) is yours. I may ask the win­ner to pro­vide me with the default or win­ner’s cur­rent blog templates.

The con­test is open to all blog­gers world wide.

This will be a lot of fun for me to design. I hope it will be fun for all of you to enter, and for one of you to win. I’m doing this for fun, and I want every­one involved to have fun. 

If this con­test works out well, I’ll do it again. The blog­ging com­mu­ni­ty wel­comed me and my lit­tle projects (The Saturday Slant meme, The Memes List, my var­i­ous scripts and devices for blog­gers, etc.) with such a warm and friend­ly embrace, that I’ve been com­pelled ever since to give back to the com­mu­ni­ty. Design is my life-long pas­sion. Combining that com­pul­sion with my pas­sion seems nat­ur­al to me.

Deadline:
All essays must be sub­mit­ted to no lat­er than mid­night Pacific Time Saturday, 28 February 2004. On Sunday, 7 March, 2004, I’ll announce the win­ner on my blog (http://​www​.iampariah​.com/blog/).

Please send your essay to . Submissions to any oth­er address will be discarded.