My name is Ben Matthews, A UK WordPress Developer, Web Designer & Blogger. My main business involves creating custom WordPress designs for businesses. I provide consultancy and training to businesses, individuals and bloggers. In the past few years, my work with some Northern Ireland Bloggers has led to them being recognised as being in the top three food blogs in Ireland and finalists in the UK blog awards. I also work with numerous web platform owners who are seeking to infiltrate their markets, am a regular speaker at my local WordPress meetup, and providing specialist training on topics such as SEO, user experience and content management. Before being a web designer, I was a School Teacher and taught 7yr olds how to blog safely.
I am always interested in creating specialised blog layouts, especially when looking for ways to build in monetisation and UX based on content. I enjoy working with blogs due to the integration opportunities that it allows with Google Search, APIs and the APIs of social media platforms.
I would like to discuss your ideas for your blog design further. To give you an idea of costs, I would charge you an initial design fee to create your theme and optimise your site (security, speed, etc). This would be around 20 hours work - for which I would charge a flat rate of $600USD. After design and setup, I would then happily provider consultancy via Google Hangouts, Skype or Email, at between $20-$35 per hour.
It would be great to discuss this further.