Pro Blog Design

The blogosphere continues to expand almost on a daily basis, and as a web designer we often inform clients of the numerous benefits of attaching a blog to their site. It is always a great way to continuously update your readers as to what new developments are being made in your business and what to look for as they stick with you on this journey.

This in turn, keeps your site well trafficked by the online masses as new content is added on a regular basis. And while there are a plethora of points and elements that are vital when designing a blog, some take precedence over the others.

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Comments are one of the most rewarding aspects of being a blogger. They’re also a great indicator of the success of your blog, and good comments will help it a long way!

While the quality of your content is the main thrust for causing people to engage with it, we can still do some things to encourage it even more. By thanking our commenters with some well chosen plugins, hopefully they will keep joining in. And as we’ve seen before, there are a lot of options.

I have used DoFollow for 2 years on this blog, but now changed to CommentLuv and trackbacks instead. In this article I will discuss what I see as the problems with DoFollow, and why I think the new setup is much better (for this blog at least).

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Highlighting the most popular posts on your site is a great way to send new visitors to your very best content and win them over.

There are a few different ways you can do this, and quite a few plugins out there to help. But why not base it on the number of comments? If you write a post that makes people talk, it must be a well written post (Most of the time…).

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Hello guys! For my first guest post here at Pro Blog Design, I’m going to show you how to sell more ad spaces by adding stats to your WordPress blog’s Advertise page.

Unless stated, the PHP codes here are going to go into your content itself. That means youl have to use WordPress Page Templates (They allow you to make a theme file specifically for your Advertise page).

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Last week I put up a series of polls, and one of them asked if I should bring back the Design Review posts I used to write. The overwhelming response was yes, so here we go!

This site under review here is 21 Gun Studios, a web design firm run by Adam. He blogs about web development, and the layout is quite unique (Which is why I chose it!).

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Thousands of blogs show avatars next to their user’s comments. The avatars are a great way to make things more personal and create some variety between the different comments.

But there are always people who don’t have an avatar. The result is usually a stack of default gray avatars. The same gray avatar you see on every other blog with Gravatars…

It only takes a few minutes to make your own, branded avatar.

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Comments are one of the most important aspects of blogging, and something that all bloggers appreciate. And yet, comment areas are a typically boring affair.

By making commenting a more enjoyable experience, you will encourage more commenters to return to your blog to check up on previous comments, and to leave new ones.

Use A Visual Text Editor

The default comments field is boring, and quite limited. It is possible to write your own HTML tags in the comment, but that’s a nuisance that you won’t do often. It’s usually easier to just leave out the formatting, isn’t it?

NicEdit is just 30kb in size, and gives a full featured text editor. Check out the comments field of this post to see it in action. It’s much easier to format a comment this way.

For anyone; NicEdit.

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