May
24
It doesn’t matter whether your blog is on the Blogger network or if you’ve opted to get your own domain, you’ll need to spice it up. First things first, though, if your blog is Wordpress based, then have you chosen a theme?
Being that there are a ton of themes to choose from, you should give thought to what you’re looking for in a theme. How many sidebars? Do you need widgets? Does it play nice with Adsense? I generally prefer to read blogs that are very clean looking without a ton of color. Pick a color scheme that you’re comfortable with and go from there. (By a ton of color, I mean if the page is too loud, people will think it’s unprofessional.)
Concentrate on how much work you’re going to have to put into the theme, as well. Themes usually don’t come right out of the box looking just the way you want them, without any edits. A lot of the more popular themes are already being used by a ton of people. Take that into consideration. Of course you want yours to stand out.
Consider doing something nifty with the header image. A lot of things can be done with Fireworks and some free time.
One last thing of mention, of course, are plugins. You can check your Wordpress dashboard to find updates on plugins. These nifty little gadgets will do some pretty amazing things for your blog. And if you’re a PHP novice (like me), then you’ll find that adding these to your blog, is most painless. There are plugins for top commentators, spam-killers, videos, you name it. Have fun with what you can do with your blog, that’s what it’s there for: an outlet.
Let me ask you this: Are you having fun with your blog?
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My name is Roberta Ferguson and I’ll be putting my two cents in here and there regarding the very basics of blogging. Even though a lot of you already know about some of this stuff, some don’t. My normal haunt is music blogging at Earsucker, but what I’ve learned in my journey in blogging, I’ll be telling you here.
Popularity: 13% [?]
No one is having fun with their blogs? I found this hard to believe….
When choosing a Wordpress theme, make sure it is widget friendly. It can be very frustrating if your theme does not work with all the newest widgets.
unfortuantly mine was not and it took me over 8 hours to fully edit the php.
sometimes i hate wordpress
Thanks Adam, I’m not all to familiar with widgets, but I’ve heard good things. So if that is something that’s important to you, then make sure you specify that in your theme search.
I’m having a ton of fun with my blog … and you are 100% correct about colors, I started off with Black, people said they didn’t like it … went to yellow … they said it was too loud … so now i’m using white … and no complaints!
LOL … i guess you can please everyone … but I like it …
Darin
I’d add that it’s very very important to use a theme that validates without XHTML errors for SEO purposes. I have that issue right now and I either need to go with a different theme, or fix approx. 70 errors.
unique is a key to blogging that allows bloggers to stand out from the crowd.
Hi Roberta,
I meant to ask you in my previous comment…do you have any links for free tutorials re: Fireworks? What exactly have you done with it re: header images?
Thanks!
Great points! I am absolutely having a fun time. I love reading and sharing ideas and thoughts with other writers online.
JoLynn,
While I’m no Fireworks expert (and I had help with my header..what a great boyfriend I have), I’ve found this link to be somewhat useful. Hope this helps.
What I’ve done is take a cool pic of a crowd off of flickr and morph it until you can’t recognize the original.
Stephen,
Thanks! Glad to hear that you’re having a fun time, I agree, sharing online is great
Thanks Roberta, I’ll put that on my to-do list and see what I come up with.
[...] of you may know my posts at PureBlogging as a guest blogger. I decided to put my junk out there for your public [...]
We have installed a lot of plugins into our blog and so far they’re great! We have also branded our site, take a look…you can’t miss it LOL
Aimee,
I checked out Foximus, it’s cute. I particularly enjoyed this post.
Thanks, yeah Jason wrote that one. That’s a really funny one. I’m guilty of a few of those myself…mostly stat checking.