101 blog templates that are not for me

As soon as I started writing blog I realised that blog presentation must be reader friendly. No doubt, content of blog is the king but along with content if blog is presentable enough to read then it’s like you can have your cake and eat it too. By presentable blog I mean that blog should not be very flashy, must have good font and colour combination, and soothing background settings. (I am not writing about how to make blog presentable so I won’t delve further into it. Google already shows millions of site on this topic). So to make my blog presentable I started looking for a suitable template.

Google nearly have answer to all my queries (or at least direct me to the right answer). ‘Blog template’ search gave me millions of results back. I scanned through 8-10 websites to find the template I was looking for but all the templates that I saw were like commodity/goods and presented no customisation to me. The blog template that I want should be according to my needs and not according to anyone else’s whims and fancies. I feel blog template is highly subjective to individual’s needs and desires. You just can’t pick and use some flowery/sunset/green/historical/random-coloured template for your blog. If you are serious blogger then you blog is your signature and you can’t design your signature on someone else’s wish. So I discarded hundreds of templates as they didn't suit my style. So here comes this idea.

Why can’t we make a web based 'blog template creator' application. Any blog template basically is some flavour or permutation of font, colour, columns, boxes, background and image (please point out in case I missed something). Application will give people freedom to arrange these flavours according to their wish. Seems like a very simple thing but this can lead to customer delight and give people's blog a unique identity. Currently some people are charging 100s of dollars just to make a blog template that suits your persona. Once this 'blog template creator' application is launched people will throng to try it out. This application will be amongst the best example of tailor made service given to customer.

Image: wordle

Trustworthy doctors/dentists

‘Writing more frequently on blog’ is now officially my New Year resolution for 2009. When something becomes your resolution it means that you desperately want to do that but couldn’t do that as diligently as you wish. New Year brings new hope and new vows to do new things or same things in better way.

Okie, to cut the crap I will be blogging more often in 2009. Till date Idea used to work under ‘push-mechanism’ i.e. they are wild and untamed and used to come whenever they wish. This is really good for me but apart from that I will also try to implement ‘pull-mechanism’ for ideas means I will try to churn my mind for more ideas. I am sure I can do that so let’s try it out. I have already jotted down few ideas as my notes that I never got time to blog so I would be posting them in next few days. So here I go:

Trust Indicator of doctors and dentist in India

When somebody needs to consult a doctor/dentist they always wonder who the best one in their locality is. This is a dilemma faced by nearly everybody sometimes. People generally ask for references from their relative and friends but that doesn’t always lead them to the best option. Your friend/relative might be visiting a doctor/dentist since eternity and they didn’t explore other better options in neighbourhood because their existing doctor/dentist serve their needs and people really don’t want to try anything new especially when it comes to doctor/dentist. So a Database of all the doctors and dentist can be maintained. People can rate doctors on the basis of their experiences. Other people can search for doctors on the basis of their trust indicators and other parameters.

Features:

To begin with portal can enlist all private practitioners, hospitals, clinic and other health industry associated firms. Portal will give people access to rate doctors and write comments as well against their webpage. Moderators will surely be required for every city/town as people may misuse this site.

Various options like consultation fees, mail ids and contacts info of doctors can also be published on specific doctor web pages.

Revenues:

Ad Revenue from health industry would surely be the first option. A part from that other revenue models can be looked at as the model emerge. Currently there is no such portal in India and first entrant in this space can surely make a big dent.

**This is just is demand supply gap study so prior to implementation a proper business case needs to made.

PS: After writing this idea, as some folks have said that you have to keep thinking on it and polish it continuously, I came across few health industry initiatives online. Google Health, Microsoft HealthVault and WebMD are among the best or popular ones. None of these 3 websites contain much info on Indian health industry (however Google Health contains a lot of info on doctor addresses etc because of sheer fact that Google is storehouse of world data) so a good India specific health web portal should surely find its rightful place in customer’s mind.