Tag Archives: themes

Don’t get stuck in default

Posted on Wednesday 4 July 2012 by Alice • 0 Comments
Fairy Blog Mother: blogging help

Click my logo to ask me a question!

When WordPress is first uploaded, either by WordPress for the .com version, or by you for a .org blog, you will be issued with the default theme.

This is generally the Twenty Ten theme, which actually is a very good basic theme to start with, as it has many adaptable features to make it look better.

TwentyTen themeIt has a nice big banner, to which you can easily upload one with your corporate design, with a navigation bar under it, a single sidebar on the right with plenty of widgets to occupy it, and plenty of space for your posts.

But the trouble is, being the default theme, leaving it unaltered does shout out that you don’t know what you’re doing with your blog.

And since blog design is important if you want to give a good impression to your readers, and especially as it’s very easy to change your theme, it’s not a good thing to leave it in the same state as when it was created.

Here’s a blog I recently had fun changing its theme:

Design Differential blog

As it is a WordPress.com blog, I didn’t have to do much to the theme, just to add in the banner and put some widgets into the sidebar and footer space.

WordPress.com has over 120 themes available to download, and if you host your own blog with WordPress.org then there’s literally thousands! Most of them are free and very easy to upload and activate, and if you are blessed with knowing HTML and PHP, then the world is your oyster!

For WordPress.com users, just go to ‘Appearance’ in the left sidebar, and click on ‘Themes’, and wade through the examples until you find one you like. Selecting is made simpler by using the filter system. There is also a mechanism for previewing what your blog would look like before you ‘activate’ your chosen theme.

Then once in place you check what options are available to you under ‘Appearance’, such as the ‘Header’ and ‘Background’ links, and experiment to create your desired effect.

Populate your sidebars with appropriate widgets, upload a picture of yourself and add it to the ‘Gravatar’ widget to show off the blog’s author, and then get blogging!

And if you want to have me change your blog’s theme and enhance it with some well placed widgets, then you only have to ask (click on my logo to send me an email).

Filed Under: blogs and blogging, design makes a difference, Free Wordpress blogs, Self-hosted Wordpress blogs

WordPress and Blogger – which one to choose?

Posted on Thursday 14 July 2011 by Alice • 2 Comments
Fairy Blog Mother: blogging help

Click my logo to ask me a question!

One of my new guinea pigs asked me this question soon after she signed up to my Blogging Guinea Pig Group, because she was already writing a blog using Blogger and I was concentrating my book on WordPress. So I decided to do some research to find out the differences.

Blogger.com and WordPress.com are both free hosting blogging platforms. Blogger is owned by Google, so the URLs are http://username.blogspot.com, whereas WordPress is independently owned and a WordPress.com blog’s URL would be http://username.wordpress.com.

The general consensus is that Blogger is easier to set up, so is best used for blogging as a hobby, whereas WordPress appears to be more complicated and can be adapted more for business use. (The reason for my book is to show that WordPress isn’t as hard to use as everyone makes out, and to create a WordPress.com blog is just as easy as Blogger.) However, this may be overshadowed by WordPress.org, the more sophisticated version, which is complicated to set up if you don’t have any web-developer experience, so it is best to hire someone to do that for you. But once you’ve learned the basics of blogging with WordPress.com, doing the same in the .org version is just as easy.

Each platform have their pluses and minuses, as you would expect. It all depends what you want from your blog. The availability of templates (Blogger) or themes (WordPress) vary considerably. Blogger may not have as large a selection of templates, but they do offer the ability to customise them for free, whereas this facility is only available as a paid upgrade in WordPress; however, they do provide over 100 themes to choose from, and some can change their banners, colours and other features.

Blogger can only import posts from other Blogger blogs, whereas WordPress accepts the importation of posts from a large selection of alternative blogging platforms. Blogger only allows the creation of 10 pages per blog, whereas WordPress has no page limitations. Blogger allows 1 GB for image storage, and will only accept images, whereas WordPress provides 3 GB of space and can upload many forms of documents, not just images.

WordPress allows a selection of users: Administrators, Editors, Authors and Contributors, for a shared blogging experience, whereas Blogger only has Administrators and non-Administrators. WordPress can moderate and edit comments to its posts, and provides Akismet for protection against spam, whereas Blogger can moderate but not edit comments, and appears to have little spam protection.

Blogger allows Adsense to advertise on its blogs so they can become monetized, whereas WordPress.com only allows Google-related advertising in certain circumstances. Blogger allows the process of changing to a customised URL for free, whereas this facility is only available as a paid upgrade in WordPress. Blogger allows blog privacy to unlimited Blogger users, whereas WordPress limits it to a maximum of 35 WordPress account holders; however it does provide facilities for password protected and private posts and pages, which could be used as a rudimentary membership site.

There, that is plenty of comparisons. Some of this is quite technical, and may be not of importance to a beginner or hobby blogger, but it does show why I am biased towards WordPress. There is also the added benefit that your .com blog can very easily be transformed into the .org version, with all the extra functions it contains and the supremacy it has on search engines, which is something to consider if you want to develop your blogging experience further in the world of business.

If there is anything I’ve missed out, misunderstood or got wrong, please feel free to correct me by commenting below. It can only benefit all of us!

Update (19/7/11): I’ve just noticed that Blogger have announced a spam filter and improved comment moderation facilities, details available from http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?&answer=187141.

Filed Under: blogs and blogging, Free Wordpress blogs

WordPress is both easy and difficult

Posted on Friday 6 May 2011 by Alice • 0 Comments
Fairy Blog Mother: blogging help

Fairy Blog Mother

Whether you find using WordPress easy or difficult, it does depend what you’re using it for and what kind you have.

I have mentioned before that WordPress have made blogging as easy as possible, and certainly the CMS (content management system) has been programmed for effortless use. The areas that you regularly use, for example, to write a post or create a new page, are designed for efficiency and straightforwardness, especially once you’ve start using it regularly, and if you are familiar with Word, you can easily adapt to WordPress.

WordPress.com is particularly focused on providing a free-hosted blog with the minimum of fuss. All you need to do is sign up, confirm your username, choose your template and start blogging. Everything is pre-programmed so you don’t need to worry about anything technical, and you can create a really good blog within a surprisingly short time-period.

WordPress.org is where the fun really starts. Here you have been given full access to the world of blogging, and you can add or subtract as much as you like from your blog. Not only is HTML accepted and works properly, which is necessary for advertising, installing sign-up forms or pasting up other promotional gadgetry, you have the opportunity to adapt your themes to suit your ideas, corporate image or preferences.

If you have the know-how, here you can pop into your CSS to change the colours of your design and links, create new banners and place images into your sidebars to promote your business, books or whatever, choose from thousands of plugins to improve the performance of your blog – in fact the more you learn about blogging, the more you can add stuff to your blog to make it do something amazing!

And if you find all of this too difficult, hire someone that knows this technical stuff, because once they’ve finished your blog will be fantastic! And as the process of writing posts and creating pages is the same as WordPress.com, it is as easy as falling off a log to post regularly, keep your readers happy, interact with them daily, encourage comments and feedback and persuade more subscribers to join your RSS feed so they can keep up-to-date with everything that you do!

Filed Under: blogs and blogging, design makes a difference, Free Wordpress blogs, Self-hosted Wordpress blogs

Is a blog’s theme as important as its content?

Posted on Wednesday 15 September 2010 by Alice • 0 Comments

Fairy Blog Mother

I read a lot of blogs, and this means I get to see a lot of blog designs.

Usually I’m tempted to go to these blogs because the headline or permalink, which entices me through clever wording and a subject matter that interests me. But on arrival, I am influenced terribly by how the blog looks, and not necessarily by the content it contains.

What puts me off? First, a dark background, with white or very pale text. If books are printed on white pages, why should blogs and websites be any different? I find it very difficult to focus on light words on an oppressive surface, especially if it is extremely busy.

Added to this, sometimes the text is extremely small. (There again, if the text is too big, it can look amateurish.) Not everyone is gifted with 20/20 vision, so why should there be the need to cram everything into a small space? If there is a lot to read, maybe serialising your blogs into smaller chunks is easier for your readers, and gives them an excuse to return to read the remainder.

Clear navigation is paramount, with page links obviously presented to encourage visitors to venture further into the site. If a visitor has to hunt for any aspect or feature of your blog or website, then, in my opinion, the designer has failed. Themes that have the sidebar as a footer are totally missing the point, as if readers are going to pan down deliberately to find out the blog’s additional material and links.

Of course, what I think is a good blog theme is purely subjective, as everybody has a different idea of what works and what looks nice. Many people like black to play an integral part of their blog’s design, narrow blogs are obviously different and draw attention to themselves, blocked in backgrounds seem to be more interesting than boring white ones, large and irrelevant imagery seem to be attractive and a total disregard for colour doesn’t matter at all.

So what are your opinions on blog theme designs?

Filed Under: blogs and blogging, design makes a difference

10 things a blogging mentoring service should provide

Posted on Tuesday 6 July 2010 by Alice • 2 Comments

Fairy Blog Mother

I keep an eye on many LinkedIn Groups, especially those about blogging, and one post caught my eye. It was from someone who wanted to know about forming a blogging mentoring service, and being the altruistic kind of person I am, I gave him my 10 opinions of what a blogging mentoring service should provide:

1. You need to be aware of business’s blogging needs; this includes explaining how blogging can benefit a business, small or large, to increase its online visibility and its audience on the net;

2. You need to research into why people have blogs (or don’t have blogs); blogs are created for a myriad of uses, business and personal, and therefore have very different styles – alternatively there may be many potential bloggers who need encouragement to start one;

3. You need to understand what blogs are used for, and whether they are used properly; similarly to above, blogs fall under many categories, but you need to understand their purposes to advise on the best practices;

4. You need to explain blogs need to be regularly updated, and to find out whether help is required with writing posts; blogs aren’t really blogs without consistent new material, so ideas for post subjects and writing styles are usually welcome;

5. You need to find out whether bloggers fully understand SEO and explain how keywords can help their blogs; this subject, once properly aired, stimulate a vast change in a blog’s performance towards its success;

6. You need to check whether they have they fully optimised sidebars; so many blogs have neglected sidebars and don’t use their widgets adequately, mainly because they don’t understand or appreciate their functions;

7. You need to advise on which plugins they need; for WordPress.org blogs these applications help enhance the blog’s performance to further it towards popularity and success;

8. You need to talk about integrating their blog’s design with their website or corporate image; using the myriad of themes available, some of which can be adapted or redesigned to match an existing style or personality through specialised blog designers (the Fairy Blog Mother is one);

9. You need to show how to get RSS and see if is it being used to its full extent; once acquired, the online world is opened up to automation of post publishing, feeding to social media and other related websites, and visibly interactive headline links;

10. You need to explain how to integrate blogs with social media; related to above, your blog should be the hub of your social networking strategy, fully optimised to interact with your audience, and present and potential customers.

I’m sure there are many more things I need to include (and if you know them, tell me in the comment box below). But in the meantime these 10 will have to do.

Fairy Blog Mother aims to offer much of this advice in this blog, and eventually through her book which she plans to publish in the future. She benefits from people asking her questions, especially specific things you would like to know about blogging and particularly from blogging beginners who may have a selection of questions they are too embarrassed to ask elsewhere.

I plan to change my style in future posts to a more advisory nature, in concise, focused subjects, and if the subject is large, to break it down into smaller posts for easier understanding. The Fairy Blog Mother was formed to explain blogging in easy to understand, visual e-courses, using non-jargon and everyday language, step-by-step with no assumptions that the reader understands technical blogging requirements. She doesn’t mean to be condescending, just informative and educational.

So, what questions about blogging do you have?

Filed Under: blogs and blogging, design makes a difference, Free Wordpress blogs, increasing business visibility, online marketing, Self-hosted Wordpress blogs, social networking

com versus org: which WordPress to use

Posted on Monday 12 April 2010 by Alice • 11 Comments

Both kinds of blog

WordPress is an extremely powerful yet very easy to manage blogging platform, or as Wikipedia describes it: “an open source blog publishing application powered by PHP and MySQL which can also be used for content management”. It is offered to the public in two forms.

First, there is the ‘free’ version (WordPress.com), where you don’t have to pay anything to set it up (very useful for blogging beginners), and there is the ‘self hosted’ version (WordPress.org), where you use your own host and domain name, with WordPress providing the software and accompanying applications (but you do need a certain amount of technical know-how to set it up).

free blogging platform

WordPress.com (‘free’) has many benefits. It is an excellent platform to learn how to blog. It is designed for the beginner or those with restricted budgets to get into the blogging world. It can be created in a matter of minutes with very limited technicalities, and everything is updated to the latest version automatically. WordPress provide a good selection of widgets (blogging features) and themes (templates), and the methods of creating and updating your blog have been made as easy as possible.

The disadvantages are that this kind of blog cannot be monetized. With strict blog police WordPress has the power to shut down your blog at any time. You lose control over your domain name as WordPress is always part of it. There are also restrictions on what you can put in your sidebar, as only certain HTML scripts are accepted; no sign-up forms, affiliate links or similar functions are possible.  Other social media providers have recognized this, such as Feedburner, and alternative arrangements are offered.

self-hosted blogging platform

But once you’ve used the ‘free’ version for a while, and have got used to how WordPress works, then you can move on to the ‘self-hosted’ version. If you are not technically minded (understand the basics of HTML and PHP), or don’t have the patience to find out how, it would be wise to get someone to create this kind of blog for you. I spent many hours screaming at my computer while I was learning how to set up WordPress.org; it is by no means as easy as the ‘free’ alternative.

It does have many advantages. You can use your own domain name, so your blog can become a ‘blogsite’, with the pages performing as a website, but with far more search engine power. There are a variety of hosts who are compatible with WordPress, and my advice would be to use those who offer the ‘one click’ system through ‘Fantastico’. It will save you plenty of heart-ache and angst as much of the hard work is done for you automatically.

FileZilla

You can manage your blog through an FTP system (I use FileZilla) so you can upload themes, plug-ins and pictures. There are plenty of extra applications you could include on your blog, obtainable from WordPress for free, all designed to help with maximizing the performance of your blog and its relation to social media, plus thousands of different kinds of themes (templates) to choose from, both free and paid for.

The sidebars can accept most programming languages, so they can be easily monetized. You can put in social networking badges, picture links, sign-up forms, RSS feeds to Twitter and other blogs, affiliate links, advertisements, and much more besides. There is a huge quantity of plug-ins available to download from WordPress that will help enhance your blog. You can also change many features of your themes, to rearrange how your blog looks to match your corporate image or preferred style.

So which one is best? It depends what you want your blog for: just somewhere to post your thoughts and aspirations, or a powerful alternative to a website with an integrated content management system, search engine compatibility and many other features to blast your way through the web. Both will raise your profile, expose your expertise and, with longevity and consistent content, will gain high status in the search engines; both will look good, perform well and satisfy your blogging needs; and, depending on your blogging past history, one will be the right one for you at this time.

Filed Under: blogs and blogging, Free Wordpress blogs, increasing business visibility, online marketing, Self-hosted Wordpress blogs