Designing a Blog Now that I had my created my first blog at Make Money Blogging, it is now time to design my blog. It is already given that Blogger had only limited templates available. I'm just hoping someday they could had provide more additional templates for this free blogging software. I had set several factors before I choose this template. Since the concept of this blog is to prevent you from spending money, I just downloaded this template from eblog templates. They provide high quality templates for Blogger and Wordpress. They are the largest free blog template provider sharing top notch blog designs. You can download your template you want for free and without hefty price tag. I just made some tweaks for the design especially the banners in order to make my blog a reality one. I made some changes in the advertisement ads which is some source of my income. For the meantime, I just leave blank for my sponsor portion because my blog is just newly born. I want to make it grow until some time I got a lot of visitors to attract the advertisers.
Moving on...
Making money is not just as easy for blogging. I had mentioned that there are some several factors I considered before I choose this theme.
Cost - this is the first thing I considered. The first time I made this blog, I'm thinking of buying an already made templates or a ready made graphics. I made a research to other websites and I found out that the minimum price tag is $5.00 to a maximum of $ 500.00. This is almost equivalent to PHP 240 to PHP 24,000 pesos respectively. Not too bad for minimum price, but before you buy it you must consider other factors as what I will share in this post as we go along. Here are some recommended sites that you can download your free templates especially for those Blogger users.
- BTemplates - they provide different styles or designs of templates. They also have available 1 up to 4 column blogger templates.
- Blogger Buster - they provide different types of templates which is easy to used. One thing I love here are their widgets. They have the ready made widgets for you to install in your layout.
- Our Blogger Templates - I also love this site because aside from the free templates you can download here is that, they also provided a column for tips and tutorials on how you can customize your templates.
- Free Blogger Help - they provide very simple style templates and just like Blogger Buster, they also have widgets to provide to customize your layout.
- The last but not the least is the eblog templates which I had already mentioned above.
Know how it works - this is somewhat synonymous to the functionality of your theme you choose. This will depend on your plan. Just like I mentioned in my first post, the choice will vary on how your site will work. If you're not getting my point here, I will illustrate some example.
If you are going to monetize a certain website that talks about a variety of topics like music or entertainment, sports, news or updates. You should not choose a one column template for it will not maximize your income.
Know how to use it - it is important to know how to use the template for you are the one who will suffer first if you choose a certain template with lack of customization features and if you do not know how to customize it. First of all, I'm not familiar in using CSS code to customize my template. I just do a little research on that. It is important to choose a theme or a template with good features for you to have little effort or cost to customize your template. The more you customize your template, the more cost you have.
Know the layout or design - don't be fool with the stunning graphics. Make it somewhat Google friendly. Google robot does not care about flash animation. Google friendly which is somewhat your site know how to pay attention to both human and machines (the simple the layout the more it is more usable to both human and machines).
Know the designer - it is important somehow to know who design your layout. This is just to make sure that the designer was a reputable one and to ensure that your template will work fine when you used it.
Know if there are support they can offer - there are rampant websites now coming out that offer lots of free template designs but not all of them could offer you support or tutorials. I had encountered some websites that ignore comments or questions when you asked for support. Be sure to check the website that offer free templates and support or even those who paid or spend money for their templates.
Know what other users feedback - commonly, you will notice some comments or feedback for other users who already using template like yours. Try to have sometime to read them for your review. This will help you choosing a better template for your blog.
For those who would like to make their blogs for free that make money, this blog is good source of information to start with.
I will come back shortly...
Good day!
Post a Comment