In this post, we continue the discussion of some of the most basic elements of a good blog that we began in our article, Blogging Basics: Platform, Hosting, Domain.
Once you’ve got your blog up and running by finding a place to host it and pointing a domain to it, you’re now ready to focus on several key elements that will help a new visitor decide in about fifteen seconds or less whether or not to spend any time and attention on your blog.
No pressure, though! (No really, no pressure — you can always make a change later).
Collectively, the the theme, logo, title, and tagline of your blog make up your visitor’s first impression of what your blog is about and whether your blog is interesting to them.
Let’s take each element in turn.
Theme
Your Wordpress Theme is a skin or template that defines the look and feel of your blog. There are thousands of free themes available. Some of the top sites for browsing Wordpress themes include:
In addition to the free themes, there are many, many vendors selling premium themes or services customizing the theme for you. Customizing a theme requires some basic PHP / HTML skills that you may not have, so you may prefer to have a Wordpress expert assist you with changes you may need to make. If that’s the case, you may consider hiring someone to take an existing, “standard” theme and extend it for you (I have done this sort of work for clients myself and it has worked out well).
Although you may need someone to help you with your theme design (initially and from time to time), I believe the need for a unique look and feel can be overrated. Although I customize my own blog themes heavily (because I can), this is not something I would probably invest heavily in if I couldn’t do it myself. To be sure, you want to pick out an existing theme that’s not the Wordpress default theme or something equally hackneyed. Beyond that, your theme should be simple, based on a white background, and have a layout that supports what you want to do . For example, if you’re selling ads, you’ll need to think about where they’ll go. My philosophy is that a bad theme may drive a user away, but a great theme isn’t going to keep them there more than a few minutes if your content is awful. Get something halfway decent looking, and start writing!
Blog Title and Tagline
On the General Options page of your Wordpress blog, the two first choices you’ll make are the Blog Title and Tagline. Your Blog Title is the name of your blog, and is the text that will show up in the title bar of your home page. You can think of this as either your main brand or your main keyword combination that you would like to appear in the search engines. (I mean it when I say main keyword combination — pick a phrase that tells both a human reader and a search engine what your blog is about. This should not be a Sears catalog of possible keywords).
Your tagline allows you to embellish this basic title with more information about what your blog is about.
Here are some basic guidelines to follow when you pick your title and tagline:
- Keep it simple. Can a reader look at it and tell you what your blog is about within five seconds or less? If they can’t, then your title or tagline are too confusing. Use concise, concrete language.
- Match your blog. Your title and tagline should match what your blog’s really doing, and what you’re trying to sell. For example, most of my posts so far have been Pro Blogging or Online Publishing, but I still have “Freelancing” in the tagline because a potential client may want to hire a “Freelance Writer”, not an “Online Publisher”.
- Consider including your domain. Not everyone will subscribe the first time they visit, so having your URL (which should also be descriptive) somewhere in the title may help a visitor remember how to get back to you.
- Don’t apologize. The default Wordpress tagline is “Just another Wordpress Blog”. Not only should you change this, you should change it so it no longer has the word “Just” in it. Your blog tagline should not be “Just the ramblings of a geek”, for example. Why would I read that? If you change it to “All the things a geek needs to read” — now that’s something people will read. Well, geeky people, anyway — but that’s not a bad population for a blog to target!
- Change is not the end of the world. Did you start out trying to be the definitive source for everything automotive, but then ended up spending 90% of your time writing about Hybrid engines? Go ahead and modify your tagline and title to match what you’re really doing. Although you shouldn’t change them capriciously, your title and tagline are as much subject to periodic review and improvement as any other element of your blog.
Logo or Title?
By default, most themes will display your title and tagline for you without further customization. One of the custom options your theme developer might discuss with you, however, is the ability to put an image logo in place of — or in addition to — the title on the page itself, while still showing the title in the title bar of your main page. Either choice is fine. SEO purists will insist on having the <h1> with the title of the blog on the page, but a well designed logo that reiterates your domain name may be a better choice from a branding perspective.
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