HOW TO: Build a More Beautiful Blog
by Matt Silverman
Whether
you’re blogging for business or pleasure, now is the time to take your
little corner of the web to the next level.
Social media makes your
blog more visible and valuable than ever, and the amount of resources
available to beautify and streamline your blog is enormous, and ever
growing.
The best part is, you don’t have to be a designer or a
programmer to create a great looking blog, but you should know where to
find the right resources, and how to align your blog’s design with its
purpose.
Learn Some HTML
We all wish the web was 100% drag and drop, but we’re not quite
there yet. You can get away with pushing the knobs and levers on the
back-end for a while, but you may never get your blog to look exactly how you envision it without knowing a little bit of HTML.
A
basic understanding of the web’s nuts and bolts will allow you to make
custom design tweaks, fix template problems, and format your posts more
precisely. Rest assured, there’s no need to sign up for classes.
Everything you need to know about the web is right here on the web.
A great place to start is W3Schools,
a site that provides great free tutorials on web development. The HTML
tutorial covers exactly the core basics you should know. While you
won’t need to code your new blog design from the ground up,
understanding how tags, text formatting, and embedding work will be
extremely valuable when you want to start customizing the pre-built
boxes and widgets on your site.
Blog (
)
customization is an experimental, learn-by-doing process. With a little
bit of coding knowledge, a wealth of options will be open to you. If
there’s something you’d like to achieve, or something that’s not quite
working in your template, a Google Search can be your best friend.
Chances are, someone else has had the same problem, and posted an
answer or code snippet on the web that you can use.
Find the Right Template
The world of blog design has come of age, and the web is bursting
with beautiful, free design resources that are easy to plug right into
your platform of choice. There’s no need to settle for simple color
scheme changes or built-in layouts. Brilliant designers are sharing
their custom-built templates on the web in droves.
Here are a few
resources that you can browse in your search for the perfect design.
Not sure which platform to set up your blog on? Hopefully some of the
designs cataloged on these sites will inspire you in one direction or
another.
posted on Feb 22, 2010
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Topics
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