Blog Building – Part 2

For a recap of Blog Building - Part 1 we discussed -

1. Hosting your blog with a private domain name or through a blog hosting platform
2. Choosing a name for your blog

In this part we will talk about layouts, colors and content structuring.

So at this point you should have your hosting and name thought of and even ready for testing. You can set up a separate test folder for your blog if you are using wordpress and test the layout or just do it on the main site its upto you. For other services where built in templates are available you can choose any you want and if they allow you to customize it don't feel scared to jump in.

Almost all templates are set up with CSS and HTML with some scripting language which is usually PHP. If you know HTML you probably know some CSS, if you know PHP well and good go ahead and go crazy with customizing your layout.

You don't need to be an expert in HTML or CSS to customize your layout. CSS is used for structuring the way your site looks in terms of colors, text, placement of HTML elements and a few other things. With HTML you can take those elements and make them look constant across all pages and at anytime you want to make any minor adjustments to a specific part of the CSS you can do so and the effect takes place site wide. No need to change every HTML page.

For setting code in a header 1 tag the CSS would look something like this

h1 {color: #00ff00}

Now anytime you want to change the color of your heading or say the category titles if they were enclosed in the h1 tag you would just get the hex value of the color and boom that's it. I'm not going to get too much into coding here as that is a whole blog by itself. Use the internet to search or read up a little if you are new to this.

So with layouts you can have the normal look of a blog which is a header area, a sidebar area, the main content area and the footer. The footer being the least important.

You can choose to have 2 sidebars if you want one on the left and one on the right or both of them aligned next to each other on the left or the right. There is the centered layout, the left floating layout or the fluid layout which takes up the whole browser width.

Whichever layout you decide to go with just make sure that you are really satisfied with it and you won't be changing it for some time to come. Because once people start visiting your blog they get used to your look and a new look can sometimes confuse them and that might just make them never come back again. If you do plan on shifting layouts and themes make sure to give your visitors a notice that changes are under way so at least they will expect it.

Colors

Colors are very very important! Let me say that again they are very very important. You're probably saying "this from a guy who has a white and black borrowed theme with pink headings" well...yeah!

You see I happen to like my color theme because it fits with what I write about mostly and that is tech stuff, some general talk, shopping now and then and stuff like this which all needs to be clear and concise aka black and white (or white and black, whichever).

So its best to choose your theme, if using a borrowed template, to best suit the topic of discussion. Every topic can be related with a color.

For example if you are talking about shopping then maybe calm greens, browns, grays, pinks and blues would go good as they are calmer colors and people need to feel calm when trying to shop or reading about deals etc. For tech stuff vivid blues, greens, black, white, orange are good choices.

So pick your colors wisely. If you find a theme that fits right with your writing and personal style and the colors don't fit. Don't worry you can most probably do a little editing of the CSS and the colors can be easily fixed for category headers, content text, link text and others. If you 're into image editing you can just replace the packaged images that come with the templates with your own.

You can also build your own template. (wordpress users only)

Content Structuring

How do you want your content to look when a somebody visits your site? Is the first thing they see a bunch of ads right at the header level? Do you want your categories to be first or do you want people to see if your site has comments first or your recent posts first.

Basically, there is no hard and fast rule for this. You can structure your content on your blog anyway you like. But there are a few pointers that I can offer from personal experience.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Heard it before right, well it can apply to you or not at all. Depends on what your writing about really. I don't use any pictures or images on my blog as its more content related, if you have a personal blog where you want to share your personal views, opinions or stuff that is well more of a personal nature than a picture is probably a good idea.

It's always better to have your categories showing at the top rather than somewhere down the sidebar. Next could be the part where you can display visitor comments and then an ad could come nicely in after. If you have two sidebars then you can add an Ad easily right next to your categories and posts or comments and work your way on down the sidebar till you are satisfied that you have everything your blog visitor would like to see about your blog.

For a new blog I recommend to steer clear of ads right at the top as it just gets ignored place them a little lower down if you really want to for the beginning, till you build up a readership.

Make sure that you label the different parts of the sidebar clearly as to what they pertain to. Call your categories "Categories" or "My Topics" or "I write about..." or something else creative but relevant.

As long as your content is structured clearly and coherently your visitors will not be confused when they visit your blog. You have approximately 30 seconds to make an impression make it count.

In the last part I will cover SEO, How to optimize ads and Networking.

Technorati Tags: how to build a better blog, colors, layouts, content

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1. Blog Building – Part 1
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3. Who’s No. 1 – YouTube Or Google?
4. WordPress Theme’s your way
5. PayPerPost’s blog