For many people, a new year means an opportunity for a fresh start. This could be personally, professionally, or digitally, and since we’re not at the stage in our relationship where we’re comfortable giving you personal or professional advice, we’ll focus on digital for now.
A beautiful blog, accompanied by your great content, will keep readers hooked and coming back for more. The best part is you don’t have to be a designer to achieve something beautiful, you can just follow a few simple steps and give your blog that makeover it deserves this year.
Choose the right theme
The first step towards a beautiful blog is choosing the right theme. In most cases, your blog is an extension of your personality, your brand, and your style. You don’t necessarily want to go with the trendiest theme if it doesn’t fit who you are. So, in the wise words of that old guy from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, choose wisely. If you’re a writer, you probably want something that highlights your words just like a photographer or artist should pick something with big images to highlight their visuals.
Custom headers
Both your site header and your post headers are great spots to add some of that personal flair. You don’t need anything like 37 pieces of flair, but a nice typeface combined with a texture and maybe even a graphic will give you that extra bit of branding to really make your blog your own. Even if your design skills are limited (I’m raising my hand here) you can piece together something simple and with more personality than most of the stock images bloggers tend to favor. You can take the header image for this blog post as an example: I scanned in a sheet of yellow pad paper and combined Jamie’s Hand with one of these Hand Drawn Vector Icons and voila!
Beautiful backgrounds
The old Myspace taught us to fear the background image, but in the years since its powers have been used for good. A great background can add that extra subtle detail to your site and bring everything together.
Unclutter that sidebar
It’s tempting to show off every single other thing you’re doing on the internet, but when it comes down to it, people don’t really need to see that stuff. If you have 17 widgets in your sidebar, you might want to trim it down to just the essentials, or get rid of it altogether. Let your content do the talking, not your blog roll.
That’s it! Just a tweak or two in these areas and you along with your beautiful new blog will be ready to charge forth and conquer the new year together.
Download these worksheets and start practicing with simple instructions and tracing exercises.
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Tinkerer. Maker of quirky fonts with a sprouty disposition.
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