While it is certainly important to have great content on your blog, the physical appearance of your website is very important as well. It doesn’t matter if you have an incredibly insightful and well-researched article there if your website isn’t easy to navigate and reasonably pleasing to the eye. A generic theme can be a major turnoff for new and potential visitors.

You could invest in getting a completely unique blog template designed by a professional, but you can achieve a good deal of originality just from modifying some of the better free WordPress themes out there. Damien Riley is a fan of the Kubrick theme in particular, but he wanted to put his own unique spin on the other utilitarian blog theme. As such, he has figured out a way where you can extend the header image into the top portion of the sidebar.

In a nutshell, what he has done is taken a larger picture and cropped it into two separate images. These two images seamlessly flow into one another, giving the impression that they are a single unified picture. There is the header image and then there is a sidebar image that “drops” from the bottom-right of the header image. This creates for quite the dramatic and unique effect.

The complete tutorial can be found at DamienRiley.com