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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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.

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.

Are you a serial blogger? Do you have more than one blog?

Do you create blogs and often find that there are not enough people interested in your topic to make it worthwhile to post? Traffic is light? Few people comment? Do you gradually lose enthusiasm for posting, and move on to create yet another blog?

If so, maybe your blogs are not well enough targeted to a niche, a group of readers who are intensely interested in your topic. If you are blogging just for personal expression, that may be OK with you, but it can also be discouraging. You feel you are alone in the wilderness, talking to the trees.

Thousands of blogs are abandoned every day, because bloggers become discouraged when they have no audience. Sadly many people start a blog in hopes of making a little income from it and then are bitterly disappointed. There seems on reason to carry on if no one is reading.

If you hope to make an income from your blog, the best design in the world (see, there is a tie-in with the topic of this blog, sort of) will not make up for not having an audience.

The best blog design begins before you ever build your blog, before you ever select a design, before you even buy a domain name. The first step is research. Yes, that dirty word: research.

You may be writing a great blog that is focused on the wrong group of people. Maybe a slightly different target niche would reward you with lots of readers.

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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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