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.)

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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?

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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.

I’ve removed the footer ads from this blog for now. The Close button kept creeping down the window. Today when I got here, the Close button was completely gone, and there was no way to close the ad window.

Yikes! These things are like weeds. I keep deleting the code, and the ads keep reappearing. Very Twilight Zone. So you may still see them, and I don’t know why. Yet. But I will find and zap them.

When I have time, I’ll contact the publisher/vendor and see if there’s a fix. Meanwhile, I can’t recommend using the Footer Ads. If you find out what the problem is, please post a comment and let me know. Especially if you find that there’s a way to fix it.

Does this happen to you, too? I keep running out of text widgets. WordPress only gives you nine.

So when you have used all nine text widgets, and you just have to add one more script or ad, what do you do? If there’s a text widget immediately above or below where you want to put the new one, no problem!

1. Copy the script or code you need to add.

2. Log into your WordPress admin area.

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Blog design directly affects profitability. Choosing the right widgets when designing your blog can help you make money. A new widget from PayPerPost.com makes it easier to make deal directly with advertisers.

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Blog design can be complex and daunting if you want to go beyond merely making an on-line journal to share your thoughts. Designing a blog on your own web site that is well optimized for search engines, for example, takes skill and know-how.

Designing a blog with WordPress that is optimized to make money is an even bigger undertaking. I wouldn’t even have the courage to start this project right now if it were not for my business-blogging mentor, Alex Sysoef, who has just released an amazing product called Web 2.0 Wealth. Without Web 2.0 Wealth, this blog would not exist, and my Talk Like a Texan blog would still be a mess.

Web 2.0 Wealth (or as I call it, W2W) is a huge package of ebooks, step-by-step videos, and too many extras to describe here. It leads you step by step from how to choose a profitable niche for your blog through how to build it, optimize and monetize it (set up a bunch of ways to make money with it) and then publicize it to bring in lots of readers.

I learned so much about so many aspects of WordPress blog construction, php scripting, plug-ins, and related topics with W2W! And I had already bought and studied a few other blog-design-and-monetization packages—some of which I liked and will write about in future posts.

Every time I turn around, Alex has added more features. And his support is fast, accurate, and truly helpful. What a refreshing change from some other vendors I could mention! Well, OK, most other vendors I could mention.

If you buy only one package on how to build blogs and make money, buy Web 2.0 Wealth. Then please come back and comment on how you used it. I’d love to see your blogs.