Making Your Blog Look Good

Blogging is a good idea for most businesses. Your blog provides extra value for your clients, more content for the search engines, and opportunities for linkbuilding. Excellent content is what makes your blog provide these benefits for your company. But how do you make your blog look good?

First, set it up to look good from the beginning.

The blog you're reading right now was styled to match the website it belongs to, by designer Shan Pesaru. Here's another example of his, using Blogger:



Marcel Sendrea did this one, using Wordpress:




Here's one by Jay Jaro, built with BlogEngine.net:



As you can see, a blog can have just as much style and individuality as any other web page.

If you want to do it yourself, you can upload a template, as I did with this blog:



Sources of blog templates include these sites:

• eblogtemplates
• btemplates
• blogfashions

To use them, you download the file and then upload it at your blog platform. If you don't know what that means, save yourself some grief and hire someone to do it for you. You're bright, I know, and you can learn how, but if you just plan to do it once, for your business blog -- well, you have work to do, right?

You can also use the customization options at your blogging platform. Here's a blog at Weebly.com, using one of their templates and their simple directions:



If you happen to find options that fit your company's look pretty well, then you're in luck. If you know a bit of html, you can match the colors and fonts and so forth, and you can often upload your own image, too.

If you're not sure whether blogging is for you, and you want to try it out, this can be a good way to make yourself a free trial. If you do this with Blogger or Wordpress, your web people can bring it into your website later, and match it to your site.

Once it's built, take the trouble to make your posts look good:

• Don't get carried away with the options. Multiple colors and fonts, centering some sections and justifying others, playing with text effects -- all that just makes it hard to read. Simplicity is your friend.
• Do pay attention to the details. Your text should look balanced. Your images should be carefully chosen and placed. Your punctuation should not suggest junior high school note-passing (!!!!!!) Things like margins and spacing make all the difference.
• Choose your images carefully. Your images should be of good quality, connected with your text, and compatible with your company's image. They should fit with the look of the website, too.
  

A good-looking blog won't make up for scanty or poor-quality content, but it will work with your good content to make a great effect.