Font

You might love Lucida Handwriting, but your blog readers may have a hard time reading a script font. Unless you blog only for yourself, the needs of your readers should be your top priority. Use a non-script font in a size large enough to see at several different screen resolutions. You do not want to force your blog readers to change their browser settings just to see what you have written.

Colors

Color can add a little personality to your blog, but it can also hurt people’s eyes and make them never want to come back. If you add color to your blog template, make sure it does not clash with other colors on the site. Avoid using neon colors, as these are often difficult to see. Do not use dark text colors on a dark background or light text on a light background. Before your blog goes live, ask a few people to look at it and let you know if the colors you used make the site difficult to read.

White Space

Text, video and pictures are important components of every blog. However, you also need some white space. Do not cram text together without using paragraph breaks or post dozens of pictures side-by-side. White space makes it easier to read your text and look at any photos or videos you post on your site.

Theme

Your blog’s design should match the theme of your content. If your blog is about marketing and you use a template covered with sports pennants, people who find your blog might get confused and leave without reading anything. Use colors, text and pictures that relate to your theme. If you use your blog for business, make sure the theme is professional and portrays your business in a positive light.

Customization

If you do not have the funds to hire someone to design a theme just for your blog, make some changes to an existing template to create something that is entirely your own. Most blog templates come with certain fonts, colors or widgets. Move the widgets around, change the colors or try new fonts. Making these changes will set your blog apart from other sites using the same template right out of the box.

Information Placement

Online readers do not have time to search your entire site for important information. You need to put it where they will see it as soon as they land on your blog. This means putting the most information at the top of the page so readers do not have to scroll down to see it. If you have an important announcement about your blog, you can create a static post that stays at the top of the page. This will help ensure that all of your readers see this important information.

Browser Checks

Unfortunately, your blog might not look the same in every browser. If it looks fine in Chrome, it might look buggy in Internet Explorer. As you make changes to the design of your blog, check the site in several browsers to make sure it displays correctly. You may have to make some slight adjustments so that the blog displays properly in all of the major browsers.

Usability Review

It’s difficult to determine how a reader will react to your blog if you don’t get feedback from other people before you go live. This is why you should conduct a usability review. Sit down with a few of your friends and ask them to visit your blog, click on all the links and use all of the features. Your friends should then give you their honest feedback about what works and what doesn’t. Making changes based on these suggestions will make your blog easier for readers to use.

Before making any changes to your blog, however, we highly recommend making a backup. This will ensure an easy fix should something ever go wrong.

Luckily, many pre-designed themes are structured more or less the same when it comes to editing. To edit your blog colors you need to click Appearance then Editor in your WordPress Dashboard. At the very bottom of the right hand side look for Styles. By default, most are labeled Stylesheet (style.css), this would be a good place to start making small changes to the appearance of your blog.

Many themes today have the Options page where you can easily change the logo, and modify the structure of your blog to your liking. It is advised to at least have some standard HTML and image editing know-how when attempting any changes to a theme. However if you feel like trying then first create a development area (a copy) of your blog, and start learning how to make these small changes to your theme without affecting your live blog.

My first recommendation to anyone with intentions for creating a blog, is to start slow and build up. Launching a site with all the bells and whistles on day one doesn’t happen. You have to start somewhere and build.

Blogs are supposed to be dynamic. They need to be updated frequently, building momentum like a freight train working up to full speed. Inevitably, all blog hubs with social media platforms will begin with incomplete components of design, content and infrastructure.

• Design: No matter how many goals, objectives, or strategies your site may have, they can’t all be presented in the first public view of your site.
• Content: No matter how much wisdom or experience you wish to share with your readers, it can’t all be included in one blog post.
• Infrastructure: No matter how many social networks you built for extending your reach with your messages of wisdom, they won’t all have a legion of followers during start-up.

Oh, by the way, this is good news because:

• No student can earn an “A” for a course just by showing up to class on the first day
• Rome wasn’t built in a day.
• There would be no Cowboys if there weren’t any horses to ride.

A blog has to walk before it can run, and must crawl before it walks.  Be patient, and take your first steps into social media & blogging sooner rather than later.

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Another popular resource for website designs as well as blog designs is the popular Template Monster where themes come with a download fee and are generally better quality if that’s important to you. My personal favorite would have to be Elegant Themes. For a small membership fee of just $19.95 you’ll have access to over 35 professionally designed themes. When I say professionally design I really mean professionally designed. The themes are simply stunning, well coded, well documented, and even come with a Photoshop file so you can make any design changes your heart desires.

For even more themes there’s always Google or the place called Woo Themes featuring a number of different themes that come with a small fee. What most people do is buy or download a theme, and then hire a blog consulting company to personalize that theme matching their specific needs. This method saves them quite a bit of money comparing to hiring a blog design company to design one from scratch.