Changing you blog design is no hard, however many people seem to stay away from blogging thinking that the themes can be expensive and hard to modify.
If the truth be known you don’t need to hire a professional blog designer to update your blogs design. In fact, with so many free blog resources, there are many ways you can update your own blog design in less than 24 hours.
And once you have done it a few times you will be able to update your blog design just like the professionals.
What Should You Look At First
First off, choose what kind of image you want to portray to your readers which really is the theme of your blog. If you’ve been blogging for some time now, you may want to take that into consideration.
If you have a conservative blog and come out with a hot neon banner and design, it could throw off your readers and distract from the theme of the blog unless of course your blog is about neon lights. Having to many flashing banners can even result as a negative and you could lose not only subscribers but returning visitors as well.
One of the very best sites that we have come across and we now use for all of our blog design templates is StudioPress they are not free but are extremely affordable and professional with tech support and a forum that will answer many of your questions instantly as well as being very customizable so you can make them very unique.
This is opposed to having a professional blog designer create your site from scratch which can cost you thousands of dollars.
Gaining a readership with good blogging topics takes time and patience. You want to be able to keep your present subscribers and gain new ones. Decide why you want your blog re-designed and what you want to achieve with it.
Perhaps, you want it to be simple when new readers find you. They come along to your blog and can see right away that it’s a food blog. Maybe you want to have a more functional blog layout so readers can check out your past archives easily.
When you have decided what you need from your new blogs re-design, you can even get your readers involved. Have a poll or a survey on the design options you’re thinking about. Run it for a month and see what vote results you get in. Write up a blog post announcing a new look coming this summer.
You will be sure to get responses if it’s a positive step. Of course, in the end, it’s always your decision but do take into account what your readers are saying after all they are your business.
The most important aspects of a blog re-design is to let your readers know that your content is not changing. That the style and writer(s) will still be around. Sometimes, there are blogs that have a new design and the blog starts to go off on another topic direction.
Make Sure Your Blogs Design Has The Options You Want
When you begin looking for your new blog design, you may find that you have many options to choose from. Do a search on Google for free blogging templates and you will come up with hundreds of pages. Have patience in your decision-making for you don’t want to make a quick decision which could be wrong and then expose your readers to a poor quality blog design. If it’s too quick, you’ll end up changing the blog design again, therefore, confusing your readers.
Some of the things you need to be looking at when selecting the right blog design are the layout options can you use widgets and plug-ins with the new blog theme. How many posts can you display on your home page and whether or not you will have to do any editing yourself to make it all come together.
Remember, you are branding your blog so it has to be a ‘new’ blog design that is sure to stay for a longtime. Add your own customized banner which can come along with your free template (it is better however if you have your own header designed). If there is no attached banner, you can create a free one by doing a Google search on free blog headers.
Take the your time in re-designing your blog. And you will see the many benefits of maintaining a professional and well themed site that your visitors will interact with frequently.
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When you are ready to show it off to the world, write-up a new post announcement about it. Invite your subscribers to see the new look and feel of your selected blog design and even get feedback on it.
Change can be a great thing especially if you are an affiliate marketer,keeping your site fresh with a new blog design and having the latest technology when it comes to designs can only benefit your bottom line being increased income.
Once we create a blog or a site its not only about us anymore it becomes more about the readers/visitors interests. Whatever developments we do for the blog we have to make the changes keeping in mind how the readers are going to react to it. If a site I frequently visit suddenly becomes flashy and poppy I’d stay away from that site 😉
Hi Brain
You are exactly right once you start generating traffic to your blog you have to maintain your readers interest that is why it is very important to make sure you have a tightly themed site on one topic not a generic site that is hard to navigate or really does not help the reader in anyway.