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!

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.

To set your blog or website apart from the mass-produced herd, you need a custom logo, great graphics, maybe a custom background, too.

But who can afford that for every site, especially if you have a lot of niche blogs to build? Well, now we all can, at a new website called Quick Web Creations!

These logos and graphics are nifty, too. Here’s the first logo I made. It took just a couple of minutes.

This site makes it easy to create Web 2.0 style letters and graphics, with reflections, shiny, glossy effects, and other trendy looks that would be a major pain to create in Photoshop. People will be impressed. Here’s another logo I found there.

It’s a lot easier than you would think.

For one thing, there are thousands of logos you can copy and change the words. For another, there are easy controls.

There’s also a short instructional video. It’s fun and easy to learn.

Need logos? Join the coolest automated logo-design and graphics service where you just pick your colors and fonts and type in whatever you want to. Anytime. As many as you need. Change them whenever you want to.

How about a custom background? You can easily and quickly created it yourself with this new service. You don’t have to own or know how to use Photoshop or any other graphics program.

You pay only $6.97 to join for life, and you can make as many gorgeous logos and graphics as you want to—whenever you want them.

Pay just once. Cheap, easy. Stunning graphics and logos. Change them whenever. That’s my kind of graphics plan. And as we say in Texas, it’s too cheap to be without. Why not take a look and see if it works for you?

HOLIDAY HINT: A membership to this site could also be a useful, fun, and inexpensive gift for children and adults.

I use Blog Design Journal as a sort of blog design laboratory. I constantly try out new widgets, plug-ins, ads and what-not.

So far, experimenting here has worked out well. It keeps me from piddling with my other blogs too much and annoying the readers any more than necessary.

Trying out Widgets

You really do need to try out widgets on your blogs. Great new ones come out all the time, while old ones quit working. Sadly some cool-sounding widgets just don’t work out. You can’t know for sure till you try them.

Page-Loading Slowed to a Crawl

Recently I joined a beta-testing group for Jonathan Leger’s new project, Real Traffic Exchange. I was thrilled.

Then I installed the widget on my blog, and it slowed to a crawl, maybe even a backstroke. Also, it seemed as though the scrollbars were not working right. I want to give Real Traffic Exchange a fair trial. I have great hopes for it! (As soon as I have the results, I’ll post them here.)

Removing Widgets

So I started removing other widgets, hoping that would speed up page loading. The first thing to go was my newest fun toy, The Gaping Void cartoon widget. It is, frankly, the hardest to justify of all the widgets. I just love it, that’s all.

Sometimes you have to give up widgets you enjoy, for various reasons. I removed the Digg widget, for example, because it was killing my productivity. It was just too tempting to click the links and then spend too much time reading news stories and the comments on them.

But removing The Gaping Void didn’t help. I was trying to figure out what else do part with, when it dawned on me that I had installed two or three toolbars in Firefox that were just taking up real estate. I never used them.

Firefox Toolbar Troubles

Then the real trouble started. Firefox slowed nearly to a stop and almost would not let me disable those toolbars. I turned of the Google bar, the StumbledUpon Bar, the Smart Toolbar (whatever that is), and low and behold, I can use Firefox again.

The Real Traffic Exchange widget was not the culprit. It was Firefox and those pesky toolbars.

Read the rest of this entry »

Blogs that are high on text and low on graphics can be visually boring. If you don’t have relevant photos or art for your blog, you might want to consider adding visually interesting widgets.

Some are useful. Some are just fun. I try to select (or edit) them to get the look I want. Widgets are easy to move around or replace as needed to help your blog layout, too.

In Wordpress, I sometimes remove a widget and park it for awhile in the available-widgets area of the Widgets page in the Wordpress admin area. Later, when I need something that particular size and shape, I can just drag it back into a sidebar.

Blog Design with Whatever Works

I know this goes against the advice of hip, trendy blogging, but it can work. The theme of this Wordpress blog is feature-laden, intended for monetization—and visually boring. It came with Alex Sysoef’s wonderful Web 2.0 Wealth blog-authoring package, and that’s why I use it.

I tweaked the colors a lot, but still the original theme needed something. I started adding affiliate ads partly for visual interest. (Some have since been removed.)

Read the rest of this entry »

By now we all know that blogs that are hosted on your own domain tend to get better readership and rank higher in the search engines. But where to host?

The company that hosts your blogs can make life easy—or miserable. If your blogs are off line, no one can read them. So if your business is based on blogs, you lose income.

Equally important, if your service is set up in a nonstandard way that makes it hard to get important scripts to run, your blog business can be crippled, or you can spend way too much precious blogging time wrestling with things that ought to be simple.

And because the future of the web and of blogging is interactivity, you need to be able to run scripts, especially large sets of PHP scripts. WordPress is one example of a large set of PHP scripts; there are many others that can enhance your blog and your business. A hosting service that doesn’t let you run many scripts or that makes it hard can be a big problem.

Plus, it’s supremely frustrating. Who needs the aggravation?

Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes the quickest, easiest way to accomplish a design task is to “cheat.” Instead of editing PHP code for example, you can adjust the space above or below a WordPress widget in a couple of simple ways.

1. Go to Presentation > Widgets, and click on the text icon on the widget to open it.

Note: Some widgets won’t open and can’t be edited,
but usually the widget above or below them can be.
In that case, pick one of those, or rearrange widgets.

2. If you know the widget is a text widget, but the text icon is not visible,
even when you click on it, you may need to drag the widget out of the sidebar,
replace it in the unused widgets area below, and then drag it back. The text
icon will then reappear.

3. With the text for the widget displayed, add an empty paragraph or two
above or below the existing text. For example: < p > < / p >

Note: The example has spaces added between parts of the code
so it will show in Wordpress (instead of WP reading it as actual code
and inserting a blank line in this post). When putting the code in your
widgets, do not use the spaces. (Remember that if you need to show code.)

4. Close the text box and Save Changes.

5. Click on the View Site link.

Now there should be extra space wherever you added a line < p > < / p >.
If not, go back and add a period ( . ) between the < p > and < / p >.
For example: < p > . < / p >

6. Save your changes again. Click on the View Site link again.

7. Check to see if the spacing is what you wanted.

If not, add or delete lines (by adding < p > . < / p > for each new line)
until you are happy with the vertical spacing (or it’s the best you can do).

The periods are hardly noticeable on screen. If you scroll down and look closely, you can see one above the BlogRush widget, where I added an extra line.

You can make these changes very quickly. More important, you can make them without really knowing PHP or HTML.