WordPress themes are free by the hundreds, or cheap by the dozens. Or expensive, if custom designed. Usually.

But now there’s a website where you can design your own WordPress themes—for free.

Yep. Your colors. Your design. Chosen from menus. Easy.

Want the sidebar on the left? On the right? Want two sidebars? No problem.

There is a bit of a learning curve. But have you even tried going through free WordPress theme sites, looking for something that works for you? Yep, that takes time, too.

I haven’t quite mastered it yet. I haven’t quite figured out the trick to adding background images. But I did create a plain, clean theme. Want to see? You can view it here.

So why not give this a try? If nothing else, it’s fun. And you might create the perfect theme for you!

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The best blog design in the world is nothing without lots of good content. We know that we need to post often, but sometimes it’s hard to keep up. We let things slide.

So Eric Giguere has posted a challenge on his blog: Write a page a day for every day in February. And he’ll give you a copy of his $97 best-selling book on how to make money with Google Adsense if you complete the challenge.

You can’t lose with this challenge. No matter what happens, you get a lot of work done that you need to do anyway. And if you complete the challenge, you get a very nice reward.

All you have to do is post a comment with the URL for each day’s post to Eric’s blog for that day. Doing that gives you a free backlink to your blog, which is great for search engine optimization (SEO).

[To clarify, you just make 29 posts in February. For each of your posts, you put a comment with a link to it in one of Eric’s posts. Your dates don’t have to match up exactly.]

By the end of February, you will have 29 free backlinks from a very popular blog, which helps your Google PageRank. (And his blog readers will see your links and maybe click on them, which could bring you more traffic and word of mouth.)

Plus, one lucky blogger will win a copy of Eric’s super-duper software, PLRSiteBuilder, which automates the creation of web sites built to make money with Adsense ads. How cool is that?

You can sign up till February 8, and you have till March 10 to post the comments with links to your daily pages. Why not give it a try? See Eric’s blog, MEMWG, The Unofficial AdSense Blog, to sign up.

If you don’t want to take the challenge, I recommend reading Eric’s blog anyway, because it’s an excellent blog on how to make money with your blog—and that’s a good thing, too.

As you know, getting links back to your blog from highly ranked web sites is a great way to both promote your blog to new potential readers and raise your blog’s ranking in Google and other search engines (so more people can find it.)

A good source of information on blog promotion and making money on line is a guy named Matt Garrett. I’ve got his ebook Lazy Git Marketing, and I like it.

So I joined his email list. You should, too. There is no cost to subscribe, and he offers some gems of advice.

Although Matt prefers to use html sites, everything he says about promoting web sites and making money with them applies equally to blogs. And he’s a pretty clever guy.

Today, just one valuable piece of information (out of several) from a recent blog post of Matt’s made the whole subscription worthwhile. He has developed a no-cost Facebook application (if you haven’t yet joined Facebook, do) that lets you add links to all your blogs and websites.

If you do not belong to Facebook, you are missing out on an opportunity to promote yourself and your blogs. Nowadays more and more employers and clients expect to be able to find you on Facebook. It is your face to the world.

Matt’s new Facebook application lets you link back to your own and others’ blogs and web sites. It also does several other things. Here’s a quote from Matt’s email newsletter:

Did you know it’s possible to get links to your sites from your
Facebook Profile page?

There’s a new facebook app called TagK that allows you to add links
to all your social site profiles, like MySpace and Flickr, to your
profile page, but the REAL neat feature of this app is if you
invite a few friends to use it as well then you get bespoke links
that you can use for linking to your own sites/blogs…

You might recognise one of the people behind this new app…

you can visit the blog for the app, which includes the link to add
the app, here:

http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=MPDTl&m=1f5hYlCNd9JiQr&b=U7kaeRwm7s_KT67hRxfBPQ

So, you might want to take a look. This one application has so many possibilities that it makes Facebook a great place for promoting your blog.

I just discovered this site where you can make a widget of your own blog posts. They call it a “blidget.”

This widget, or blidget, automatically picks up and displays your last few blog posts. It is your very own private BlogRush-type widget, featuring only your own blog!

Others can then get your blidget and put it on their blogs if they want to keep up with your posts (sort of like putting the Digg widget on your blog). Or you can put your blidget on other blogs and/or websites that you own.

Not only that, but when you create a blidget, you can then easily add it to your Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, or other site by clicking a button. It’s all very automated and easy.

Here is an example that I made for this blog:

You can customize your widget, and others who get your widget to put on their blog can customize it to suit their site.

Register, and you can store your widgets and have them listed in a blog directory for others to see (and maybe post on their blogs).

Also, by registering your blog, you get a free link back to your site from what is sure to be a highly Google-ranked site as it catches on. (That’s great for getting traffic and helping raise your blog’s ranking).

This is really fun stuff! Go see for yourself at Widgetbox.com.

If you do a lot of blog design (or web design), you know what a pain it is when your PC seems to get slower and slower. That is not your imagination—or too much caffeine.

PCs really do get slower and slower after you have used them for awhile. The more you use them, the sooner that happens.

While there are software programs that claim to clean up (and speed up) your PC for you, they only do a partial job. But a young guy named Kris Maineri has a better way. For $10 he’ll sell you an ebook with videos to walk you step-by-step through cleaning up your PC to make it faster.

It’s called PC Secret Formula. It really is only ten bucks, including the videos. It’s easy and effective, and it works.

Even better, he will show you how to keep your PC from slowing to a crawl again. It takes just a little more time than installing and running one of those pricey programs, and it does a lot more good.

Your PC will run faster than it has in a long time. And at $10, it’s way cheaper than buying a new one.

How does this relate to blog design? When you are sick and tired of working on your blog design because you are tired of fighting a slow PC, you tend to skip things, cut corners, and sacrifice quality. (Ask me how I know?)

We never have as much time to spend on design as we would like anyway. That is, there is never time to really perfect the design as much as you could. Why waste time needlessly waiting on a slow PC?

Instead, try the PC Secret Formula. Speeding up your PC will leave you more time for designing blogs.

If you think blog design does not matter much, or if you think it’s about looking hip or cool, you need to see the scientific proof that design can make or break your blog or web site.

If you have not taken professional courses in publication design, this video may blow your mind. It explains how eye-tracking devices and software are used to find out exactly where visitors look at your pages, how long their eyes stay on each part, and the path the eyes take an your page. You may be shocked.

If you have studied publication design, it is still a good reminder. You may still be surprised.

Go watch this amazing video at Stompernet.

While there, you can download a free program to help you check the layout of your own site. Plus, there are many other videos you will want to see.

Incidentally, the speaker is a guest blogger on the site. Clearly he did not have any input in the Stompernet site design, because the lack of contrast between the light yellow-green links and the white background makes small type illegible and medium type criminally hard on the eyes.

But the video is top notch, so please take a look. Good design is not about great graphics and trendy colors. After viewing this video, I don’t think you’ll ever look at a blog or web design the same way again.

When you start a blog, you always hope that people will read it. But how will they know it’s there? How will they find your ultra-cool, well-designed blog?

If you are lucky or have done everything right, they will find your blog near the top of search engine results for your topic.

How do you get that to happen? How do you get your blog to rank well in search engine results?

Jon Leger has made quite a name for himself as an expert on raising the search engine ranking (in the search results) of blogs and other sites by various clever means. Now he’s about to release a report that he says debunks many popular myths about what makes your blog or website rank well in Google searches.

He is offering one chapter of the report for free. I suggest that you download a copy and read it. It’s only a few pages. If you do, please let me know what you think.

Personally I don’t think what he says accounts for my Art Fun Cheap blog achieving a PageRank 4 only 7 weeks after I started it. I didn’t advertise it. I did not buy or trade links. I did not put articles linking back to it in article directories. I didn’t do much of anything to promote it except register it with BlogCatalog, MyBlogLog, and Technorati.

Almost all my traffic comes from Google searches. Lately I’m getting some from Yahoo, too. That tells me I found a topic people are interested in, that has little competition, and got the keywords right. Because there are still not very many links to the site. Yet people from all over the world have found it through search engines.

So as much as I respect Jon (a lot!), I can’t totally buy into his explanation for why sometimes lower PageRank sites outrank higher-PageRanked sites in search results. He says PageRank comes strictly from links. I say that may be mostly true, but my example shows that it can’t be the whole story.

It appears to me that if you build a site on a topic that people are actually searching for in search engines, and there is very little competition (sites with quality information), Google will consider your site an authority site by default—and give it PageRank.

For the same reason, therefore, Google will also rank it highly in search results. So, if your site had a low PageRank but great information that matched the search string, wouldn’t you rank highly in the search results? That seems to be my experience. My site was being found in Google searches from the start—when it had a PageRank of 0.

Think about it. Imagine, for example, that suddenly the world gets interested in a remote tropical island called Isla Coqui (maybe Johnny Depp buys it and the Dalai Lama goes to visit?).

If you had a 12-page, original-content site called IslaCoqui.com (and hardly any other site even mentioned Isla Coqui), don’t you think that Google would consider IslaCoqui.com an authority site? Apparently Google would.

Even if the number of visitors interested in that topic was small, your site would be an authority and could acquire PageRank and also rank well in Google searches.

Anyway, that’s the way it looks to me. What do you think? Read the free report pages and post a comment here, OK?