Pro Blog Design

Carl Ocab writes a blog on how to make money online. There are many, many sites about making money online, but this one is different. Carl is 14 years old. Starting at age 13, he has worked up his way to 300 subscribers, and designed the theme himself! When Carl asked for a review, I was happy to oblige.

What Has Been Done Well?

• Style. Carl is 14, and he’s proud of it. Perhaps the site could have looked more professional? Traditional? Dollar-bill-green? Instead, Carl’s theme is modern and forward. It’s a new generation. New advice. A classic design just wouldn’t cut it for him.
• Color and logo. The color and logo are the main proponents of the style here. The highly contrasting black and white colors, mixed with the dark red look modern. The logo is fantastic, not because of the modern font, but look at the decoration behind it. It’s not just a decoration. It’s a graph! A perfect fit with the blog’s topic.

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Photo by Aki Jinn

There are millions of blogs out there. You need to stand out from all the rest; be different to be remembered. However, standing out doesn’t just mean using a custom theme, it means customising every part of your blog, including the default messages.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 9:17 pm and is filed under General Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

We’ve all seen that message on blogs before, and what opinion does it give you of said blog usually?

It doesn’t. That’s the problem. The owner hasn’t bothered to put some personality into the blog, and as such, you have nothing to remember it by.

This is the most extreme example of course. The quoted paragraph is usually changed (removed?) by blog owners, simply because it is so over-worded and unfriendly to readers. What other lines in your blog can be given a personality of their own?

Encouraging Comment Messages

When your post has 0 comments, you want to do everything you can to encourage that to change. Wordpress offers an easy method of doing this through comments.php. Simply enter the message you would like to display where you see the line:

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Inevitably, someone will wind up on an error page on your website. It has to happen. It just wouldn’t be the internet if everything worked out perfectly. So, how are you going to prepare for these visitors?

This article isn’t a guide to how to create custom 404 errors pages. It’s very easy to do, just Google for it and you’ll find a million results like this one.

1 – Be Funny

Your reader has just been landed in a dead end. They’re annoyed and aggravated at the loss of their time, not to mention the fact that they now have to resume their search for whatever information they were after in the first place. What better way is there to cheer them up than to make a joke?

My favourite example of this is at Lizzdmc Productions, where the 404 page offers a psychiatric analysis before advising you on what to do next. This is also the approach I have tried to take with Pro Blog Design, where you’ll find I modified a popular parody of The Raven, by Edgar Allen Poe.

2 – Be Helpful

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