Continuing the A to Z of blogging with part K. K is for keeping up appearances. I touched on this subject in Part J but it seems to be cropping up more and more, so I thought that it would be worth giving it some page time.
Blog appearance, something that seems to fixate people. Seriously the hours that I have spent with people with blogs who stress over a font or colour is nobody’s business. Now I am not suggesting that you get a blog and run with some shitty theme. Yes, of course the look has some importance, but it really is not a priority and moreover it should not be so important that it detracts from the quality of the content or worse stop you creating any content.
The great thing with Wordpress, assuming you are using Wordpress and if you are not then you really should!, is that its really, really easy to change a theme if you decide that you don’t like what you already have or get bored with it. There are an absolute ton of great looking free themes which are perfectly adequate to allow you to get up and running with a nice looking blog and if several months down the line you fancy a change or want some added functionality you can just change it over. Alternatively you may want to switch over to a custom designed or premium theme, either way you have a multitude of choices.
This is all fine if you are running a stand alone blog but if you want to run your blog as part of your current website and make it look like your website then the choices can be limited. In this respect I would personally get your web designer to pull a design together for you and make it look the same as your site. It will save you hours of hacking a free theme apart to try and make it work.
So my advice is to get your blog up and running with a tidy and functional theme, concentrate on the content creation and as you progress with your blogging adventure take some time down the road to review and make changes as you see fit. Remember, your blog will evolve as you progress so don’t spend to long at the beginning fussing over the look and feel.
To finish, here are some great free and premium themes. NB – Some links are affiliate links, you pay the same price and I get a little in return for the referral. After all it helps keep the fires of this blog burning.
Free Themes
Twentyten - The default Wordpress 3.0 theme. It’s functional and simple enough to make some basic changes to the look and feel. I like this theme!
Mystique – The theme of choice for “Social Media Experts”. Feature rich and easy to customise.
Atahualpa - The theme that nobody can pronounce! Chock full of customisation options and easy enough to use. I like this them!
ChocoTheme – Not everyone’s cup of tea but I like it.
For the full list of themes click this little link
Premium Themes (The ones you have to shell out for)
Thesis – My favourite theme/framework. Full of customisation options and easy to use. The newly released v1.8 is awesome, so much so that it gets my awesome badge!
Woothemes – Big collection of premium themes and a membership option. Personally I have not used these but they do look pretty cool
Studiopress – A complete Wordpress framework that is gaining huge momentum with some high profile bloggers using it such as Chris Brogan