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Choosing a template for your blog can be just as overwhelming as choosing what plugins to use.
Your template or theme, sets the tone for your blog. While I believe you should eventually have a custom theme made, it is best to start out with one of the many free ones already available. Even if you are using a predesigned theme, you can still give it the customized look by adding some of your own images and graphics.
While I am focused mainly on hosting my own Wordpress blogs, I also believe you should be creating “feeder blogs” on free blog hosting sites like Blogger. One of the best sources for professional looking blog templates for both Blogger and Wordpress is http://www.eblogtemplates.com/
Many of the Blogger templates on eblogtemplates.com are based on some of the most popular Wordpress themes. I was very surprised when I first found it how well some of the Blogger themes looked.
If you are hosting your own Wordpress blog, there are many more websites out there offering free wordpress themes. Simply do a search on google for “Free Wordpress Themes” and you will find a lot of different sites.
When testing out the different themes, one thing to keep in mind is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). One of the things I do when evaluating themes is run a scan of the page to see what parts of the page will be found by the search engine spiders first. Many times, you will find that if the theme has the sidebar navigation on the left side, the navigation will take priority over the actual content of the blog which can be bad for SEO. It is possible to have a left navigation and have the main content found by the spider before the navigation, but it takes some html coding to make it work.
The site I use to determine what the search engine spiders see when the visit the site is found here: http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/
This tool acts like a search engine spider and grades your site/webpage based on key SEO elements to watch, such as title & keyword meta tags, alt tags for images, broken links, and the actual content.
christion
December 27, 2009 at 11:53 pm
Good info. thank you