Trying to expedite my overall design decision. Many of the blogs I have seen appear to have a vanilla quality to them. I may simply have insufficient knowledge of the merits and customization aspects of software like Wordpress, but I feel the compulsion to build my own. I am looking for some broad recommendations for a design/development approach from those who may have ventured this path as well, perhaps links to sample sites with custom development, info on blog data model issues for performance/flexibility....any help would be appreciated. thks.

I guess it depends on how comfortable you are developing your own blog. If it's just the look you're concerned with you can really get any look you want.

If you look at my blog you can see you're not limited to the usual designs you see. Not that my look is necessarily special, but it's different from the usual. I'm using WordPress and most of the changes were just to one css file. WordPress also has their own set of what they call template_tags to help in making some changes and if you know php you can make more of your own.

WordPress has an active developer community and there are a variety of plugins available to add a lot of feature the basic installation lacks.

Like I said it's up to you whther or not to start from scratch, but why not take advantage of one of the current blogs and then customize it to suit your needs. I would think the time you save would be worth it.

Thanks vangogh. I will investigate the developer community. I will tell you that look is only one component. I would like to potentially gather supplemental data for blog entries/responses and you can correct me if I am wrong but I suspect that I am constrained to the model that comes with Wordpress.

You might want to take a look at the WordPress Codex to find out more about WordPress, especially the plugins that already exist.

So far anytime there was something I wanted to add I was able to find a plugin within a short time that did what I wanted or close enough to what I wanted. I haven't written any myself, but they're usually just a single php file