Most blog templates suck

I’m a fairly decent web designer.  I’m not great by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m not really visually creative.  I tend to express my creativity in the apps I build, as well as in my writing.  So given the fact that I’m really proficient in CSS and HTML, I can make simple web applications look good if I don’t have the help of a designer.  That being said nothing replaces a great UI designer, who are worth their weight in gold!

But when it comes to my blog, I want it to look attractive without having to spend a ton of time on it.  I’ve given up on trying to write content management systems.  To me they’re a solved problem – maybe not solved particularly well, but it is to the point where I don’t feel I’d like to contribute anymore to the field – so tweaking my own website content by hand holds no interest to me.

But seriously, why do the available blog templates out there have to look so damned horrible?  Even the commercial blog templates for WordPress all seem to be lacking in some serious areas.  Is it really too much to ask that I can have an easy-to-read blog template that will adjust to the width of the browser that doesn’t have serious CSS problems on one browser or another?

Over the next few days I may be tweaking my blog’s template a bit, because I’m tired of the standard one-size-fits-none layout that most templates have.  I might even pay for a commercial template, if it means my blog doesn’t look like the sidebar of a print newspaper anymore.