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!

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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.

Choosing blog colors often takes a backseat to choosing a good theme, installing widgets, writing posts, and all the other work involved in building and maintaining a blog. But colors are much more important than they may seem.

Here’s why:

1. Color is the first impression people have of your blog. Before they read a word or recognize the image in your header, color affects them. The effect can attract or repel them.

2. The colors of the text, type, and mouseovers on your blog have the most affect on two things:

Readability (whether your blog is easy and pleasant to read)

Legibility (whether it is possible for most people to read, without hurting their eyes)

Trust me, if it hurts their eyes to read your blog, they won’t.

3. Enhancing or cancelling your message. If you blog about business, and your blog is pink and frilly, guess what? Unless you’re Mary Kay Cosmetics, you’ve got a problem. You just won’t look business like.

4. Up to date? Or faddish? Yes, your color schemes should be up to date. But if you use the current favorite fad colors of today, guess what happens tomorrow? That’s right, your site looks outdated and boring. And that makes your ideas and offers seem outdated and boring, too.

5. Getting lost in the crowd? Go your own way! Better to blaze your own path with a classy/classic color scheme that creates a distinctive, memorable image.

6. Know your audience, and choose colors that appeal to them. In the U.S., older guys often choose supposedly macho colors (tan, gray, black, rust, orange) no matter who they are trying to communicate with. But what are they conveying? Is rust a good color if you’re selling cars or precision metal instruments? Does gray appeal to your market? Find out! Design your site to please your audience, not yourself.

Blog design is my priority, but let’s face it. We all have to be constantly on the lookout for good ways to promote our blogs. Especially quick, easy and free ways.

So I was thrilled with the idea of BlogRush.com, and I told you about it a week or so ago in a post called Promote Your Blog Instantly With BlogRush. No Charge!

At the time, the service had no track record. But I was betting on the brilliance of the concept—and of the founder, John Reese, who has made many millions on the Web. The results are in. It works! It is especially good for younger, less-well-known blogs, like this one.

The only thing I didn’t like was the widget itself, which was ugly. It really clashed with some of my blogs, but I used it anyway.

Early on, John promised colors, or “flavors” of widgets, and I could hardly stand the wait. Now they’re here! And they are beautiful, well-chosen colors.

I’ve chosen a conservative dark blue to blend with this blog, and various other colors for my other blogs. (Feel free to go look, please.) Talk Like a Texan got Ice (pale gray) to go with the colors of oaks, bayou and spanish moss.

New Health Ideas got a Plum widget. Art Fun Cheap got a Watermelon (emerald green) widget to match the accent color of the WordPress theme. And so on. It was so much fun.

And here’s (almost) the best part. You do not have to cut and paste any code/scripting/whatever to change the widget Flavors. Let me say that again: No cutting and pasting. No wp-admin.

Once you’ve registered and added your blogs, you can just go to the BlogRush site, log in, and apply whatever flavors you want to. Anytime. It all happens remotely.

Sheer blog design bliss! It’s my favorite new toy!

And the widget works with other blog engines. I have put one on a Blogger blog, Tengsha.com, and it works great there, too, including changing widget colors.

As far as the service itself goes, I’m delighted. There have been problems with cheaters lowering the overall click-through rates, but I’m confident that those will soon be sorted out.

BlogRush is truly a fantastic service! And it is free, quick and easy—three of my favorite things.

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.

In the grand old tradition of alphabet lists (A is for Apple, B is for Bear, …), here are 26 blog design principles, from Audience to Zones:

Audience—Who are you writing for? What do they like? Don’t imitate the sites they frequent, but be aware of the kind of look they like.

Blog engine—The WordPress blogging engine, hosted on your own domain, is by far the only way to go for flexible design, prestige, a wide selection of free ready-made themes and plugins, and search engine optimization. There is also a wide selection of tutotials and instructional videos for WordPress these days. Many are free.

Color—Color conveys meaning. What are you saying with your blog? If your links are pale gray or pale blue or some other unreadable color, you are saying I don’t care whether you can read this or not. And most people cannot. So you will annoy and lose potential blog readers.

Design principles. Do you know the basics of good design? If not, either learn them or hire a good blog designer. Design matters. It helps convey your message to the right audience. It helps you get and keep readers.

Elegance—Strive for elegance in the mathematical sense: simplicity and directness. No matter what your audience and topic, make sure your blog is optimal for that audience and that topic, with no extra gimmicks or clutter.

Focus—What is your blog topic? Again, who are you writing for? Focus your design on communicating with that audience about that particular topic. Context is everything.

Graphics—The style of blog graphics should match the style of the blog—and each other. A ragbag collection of ads, free widgets, and fuzzy photos (not to mention crappy clip art) is worse than no graphics at all. If you plan to fully monetize your blog, it’s worth paying a pro to get the riight look if you don’t have a trained eye for graphics yourself.

Headlines—Make sure the headings are easy to read. You’ve written them to be catchy and include keywords relevant to your blog topic. (Haven’t you???) Now make sure people can easily read them.

Ingenuity—Even the best theme has limitations. Experiment. Innovate. A little ingenuity can solve design problems and make your blog stand out. For example, did you know that if you run out of text widgets, you can put two scripts into one WordPress widget? You can.

Read the rest of this entry »

Your blog may not seem hard to read to you, because you already know what it says. But if it makes your visitors’ eyes tired, they’ll leave. Using these 6 tips can make your blog easier to read and more appealing and can help turn casual visitors into loyal blog readers

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