The Bloggers With The Most To Say
blog design: is it worth it?
i'm a mommy blogger. let's take a second and swallow the vomit before things get messy. okay, awesome. so yeah, i'm a mommy blogger but not your typical "i just cleaned up my kid's snot, do you wanna see, huh, do ya?" type bloggers so needless to say, i'm wary of getting my blog designed and having my family dancing on the page in cartoon form. ope, i feel the vomit coming back up.
so my question is two-fold:
1. is it worth my time to get my blog designed? would redesigning it up my follower/suscriber count or should i just go with what i got?
2. if redesigning is pertinent to you know of any good designers that wouldn't want to turn me into a lifeless cartoon bobble head?
thank you for your help. and go to alabaster cow to see if you think my blog design is purdy enough just the way it is.
gracias,
ericka
so my question is two-fold:
1. is it worth my time to get my blog designed? would redesigning it up my follower/suscriber count or should i just go with what i got?
2. if redesigning is pertinent to you know of any good designers that wouldn't want to turn me into a lifeless cartoon bobble head?
thank you for your help. and go to alabaster cow to see if you think my blog design is purdy enough just the way it is.
gracias,
ericka
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Barbara on -
I think it's having a unique design is definitely worth it. It makes you stand out from the rest.
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Permalink Reply by Anna on -
I thing designs can be fun, but I read all of the blogs I follow through a reader, so I'd never see it.
I, personally, would never pay to have one done - but I'm very cheap. And poor.
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Permalink Reply by Ericka Clay on -
i'm looking at the $50-$70 range so i'm not willing to spend too much money. i think that's where the problem lies - i'm cheap too and i'm not finding to many designers that do what i'm looking for for a minimal price. woe is me.
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Permalink Reply by Ericka Clay on
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thank you for the help!
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Permalink Reply by Ryan Jennings on -
I actually like the way your blog is set up. I'm a web designer and when it comes to blogging something that is simplistic is so much better that is completely over board. I think your layout is fine. Maybe fix the border around the header image so it isnt sticking out.
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Permalink Reply by cooper on -
I'd rarely pays to have a free blog platform designed unless you have a lot of money to throw around, and or if it is your source of income. I assume that most people who are making their sole income of blogging are self hosted.
If you're going to pay for something it should be a self hosted WP blog where you would have a choice of a gazillion free themes, many easily configurable with really nice fonts and so on. You can get a decent blog host to try that out for a year, and pay only ten dollars a year for hosting.
But then again I'm not clear on what people charge for blogger designs. If they charge just a few bucks to have them mess with the color and fonts, and add an image or background, it's probably worth it if you can't figure out how to do that yourself, but I tend to prefer minimal design, and read most blogs to read so just want nice fonts and simple design.
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Permalink Reply by Angie on -
I think blog designs are awesome and help to truly personalize your page. I always create my own, so I know everything there is hand picked and special. :)
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Permalink Reply by Anthony Licari on -
You own your own domain? Yes there's a lot of things you can do aside from the design to increase your subscription count if you own your own domain. The first thing would be to get off blogger but given your budget I really am not going to give any recommendations. If you ever do have a larger budget there's many many many things you can do to increase your count substantially.
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Permalink Reply by Ryan Jennings on
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anthony can you give me a few tips on how to increase traffic since i own a domain?
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Permalink Reply by Anthony Licari on
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Are you being facetious or serious? I see above you said you do design, but if you are serious I certainly can share a few things.
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Permalink Reply by Ryan Jennings on
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i'm being serious, my major is graphic design. not blogging hah
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Permalink Reply by Anthony Licari on
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After looking at your site, the big thing with the individual pieces would be to change your URL's so they reflect the title of the page. Right now it's just PHP ID's... so have http://yoursite.com/this-is-the-title-of-the-post which will help your organic results. Set up a sitemap that submits to all the major search engines everytime there is a change on your site. If you have cron make sure it hits your sitemap.xml every hour. You do have the 301 redirect from www. to without the www. in the htaccess which is good. I'm assuming you've submitted your site to various engines? Outside of making sure the semantic layout of your site is set up correctly for the various bots to index and return results the rest of your organic returns will just be from networking so on Twitter and on other sites you follow just leave good comments with your URL in it.
For everything that's not organic, your current visitors and such just ensure that they have the ability to save and share your content and site in general. Maybe add the tweetmeme, digg this, reddit buttons to your posts... possibly an email/print link. For the site in general you have the Twitter button which is good. Maybe offer a link so people can stumble the main URL and bookmark it via Delicious.
Those are a couple things, just after quick glance that I would do. Of course I don't always do those things myself(I offer little ability to share content on my main site) it really just depends on what your motives are and long term goals.
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