When you customize your blog design by tweaking a WordPress theme, Blogger template, or other blogging application template, you are making your blog unique. There are so many things you can do to make your blog design reflect your specific blog topic and personality. Use the Blog Design Checklist below to make sure you've customized all of the elements that you can to make your blog design shine. Keep in mind, depending on your blogging application, you may not be able to modify all of the elements in this list. However, for WordPress.org blog design, all of these elements should apply.
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Make sure your blog passes the blog design checklist.[/caption]Header, Background and Top Navigation
Your blog's header, background, and top navigation bar are critical elements of your blog design. Make sure the images you use in your blog design header look great and reflect your blog topic. Also, make sure your top navigation bar is well-organized, and the colors, roll-overs, and drop-downs are clear. You might want to include a search box in the header area so it's always available to visitors no matter what page or post they land on. And don't forget your blog's background! Be sure to give it a color or image that matches your overall blog design.
Main Content
The main content area is the part of your blog design where your post and page content are displayed. Modify your heading tag formatting (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6) as well as your paragraph font and size, line height, block quotes, bulleted and numbered lists, and bold, italics, and underline formatting. Also, make sure your link colors (including link rollover and visited links) are formatted the way you want them. Finally, check on image formatting and make sure it's configured the way you like.
Post and Page Elements
Configure how you want information related to post authors, pubication dates, and the MORE tag to look in your blog posts. For example, do you want blog post excerpts to be followed by "Read More" or "Keep Reading"? You need to configure that if you want to change it from the theme's original coding. Also, determine whether you want posts and tags to publish with posts and decide where you want all of this information to appear (for example, before or after each post). Finally, choose how many posts should appear on each page and how they'll be offset from one another. For example, will white space be enough to separate multiple posts on a page or do you need a divider line or graphic element for division?
Comments
Take some time to configure how comments will be published on your blog. Will they be threaded? Will they include gravatars? How will comments be formatted? these are all things you should configure as part of your blog design. Keep in mind, both the form where visitors can submit comments and the actual published comments need to be configured. Make sure your comment form highlights mandatory fields and provides an option to subscribe to comments.
Footer
Be sure to include the usual copyright information and important links such as a link to your contact page, sitemap, and so on in your blog's footer. However, you can also offer extra information in your footer such as RSS feed updates from other blogs you write or links to useful resources. Try to make this space work for you rather than simply using it as a catch-all for legal disclaimers.
Sidebar
When you customize the design of your blog's sidebar, consider the width of the sidebar (or sidebars) as well as the font, style, and colors used in the headings for each section (i.e., widget for WordPress users) of your sidebar. Within your sidebar, you can include any information you want. For example, you might want to include your social media profile links and icons to invite people to follow you across the social web as well as an invitation to subscribe to your blog's RSS feed. You might want to include links to your most popular posts, ads, links to your blog archives, and so on.
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