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Two Free WordPress Themes That Can Reduce Your Blog Setup Time by Half
Two Free WordPress Themes That Can Reduce Your Blog Setup Time by Half
WordPress themes are also known as layouts or templates. These are files that create the look and feel of your blog content. WordPress themes can be very simple, like the one that comes standard with every install, to the complex. Bloggers can choose from free and paid versions of templates. When choosing a template, you should choose one that will give you a lot of ability to easily customize the template to fit your branding needs. This article discusses 2 templates (or themes) that have a lot of customization features which are relatively easy to a create unique brand.
All WordPress templates allow you to customize them by going into the Edit page of the Appearance tab. If you are not comfortable with PHP and HTML code, then you may have some trouble in customizing your appearance. One benefit of the themes mentioned in this article is they are customizable through a special theme options page, which means you can get your WordPress site up and running much more quickly.
1) Atahualpa Theme
This theme is a free theme that was created by ‘Bytes for All’ and can be found on their web site where you can ask questions and get community support for this theme. Once this theme is installed, you can customize the theme in the Appearance >> Atahualpa Theme Options page. Once here, you will find a host of options to highly customize your theme. Webmasters can configure special CSS styles for things such as the header, the layout, and page features such as headings, links and menu bars. Users can easily upload header graphics that can rotate through the header graphic.
Other options that can be customized include the number of columns you want on your blog (technically you can have from 1 to 5 columns), which side you want you sidebars to be on, or what you want your widget boxes to look like. The look and feel is highly customizable and is a great start to quickly getting a professional look to your blog.
2) News Magazine Theme
The free News Magazine theme was created by Anti Social Media LLC. This theme gives you several easily customizable options that can be set in the Appearance >> News Magazine Theme 640 Options page. The News Magazine theme doesn’t have quite as many options to set up as the Atahualpa theme, but you can add code for site tracking (can be done through the use of plugins), ad rotating and just adding text or java script code to parts of your template.
One nice feature of this template is that you can easily take featured categories and spotlight them on your blog through simple dropdown selections. One very nice feature is that you can control the excerpt length of your blog postings on the index page. On 99.9% of the WordPress blogs out there, the home (or index) page prints the entire text of the blog post. A better format for visitors is to have a post excerpt and they can click a link to read the entire blog. Currently there is no function in WordPress that allows you to display excerpts of your blog postings. This blog theme allows you to display excerpts with their ‘Blog Mode Excerpt Length’ setting.
These two WordPress themes are varied enough to get you started and well on your way with your first (or second) WordPress blog. The ease of these customizable settings should greatly reduce your setup time while creating a fairly well customized blog. To make the most advantage of setting up your blog for more traffic and more automation, taking a WordPress training class will speed up creating a decent blog following.
How to Retain Your Blog Readership
How to Retain Your Blog Readership
There are countless articles published on the internet talking about how you can build traffic to your blog and there seems to be an unlimited amount of resources to building your traffic. The only problem is that most of the traffic generation techniques that are being taught don’t send return visitors. I simply mean that you may get traffic by completing certain things like article marketing, social bookmarking and link building but the traffic typically won’t sustain and everyday you’ll need to regain the traffic. The point of blogging is to have a solid readership that comes back to your blog on a daily basis, and this is when you can start making good money with your blog so you need to do your best at retaining visitors. There are some great methods at retaining your visitors and building a readership and I’m going to briefly talk about some of these methods with you right now.
Unique Themes
You should make sure that your blog uses a unique theme, simply because too many people use the free blog themes and they don’t stand out anymore. If you use a unique theme that is attractive you can build your blogs branding while also gaining a solid readership. People are also more inclined to read blogs that are designed nicely according to surveys recently conducted. You can buy a coded WordPress theme for under $200 nowadays on many webmaster forums so the investment isn’t going to make you reach too deeply into your pockets.
Great Content
An attractive theme isn’t going to be the only thing you need in order to stand out from the rest of the blogging world and you’re going to need to put a lot of effort into your content as well. Writing blog posts is an ongoing process that you need to do everyday, but you need to make sure that you do in fact post daily so that when you begin to grow a readership they have content to read that is fresh. The search engines also love content so the more you post on your blog with useful content the more search engine placements you’ll begin ranking for.
RSS Feed Subscriber
You need to make sure you utilize the RSS feed subscriber which allows your readers to read your blog from a number of different blog readers on the internet. The more RSS feed subscribers you have the better because this means that people want to keep your blog nearby so they can continue reading it. You should have a widget in your header or sidebar that allows all of your readers to join your RSS feed and there is also a plug-in that you should use. The plug-in will post a short line at the bottom of each of your blog posts automatically that asks the reader to join your RSS feed and gives them the link to join. This is a great way at reminding people about your RSS feed and can result in more readership.
As you can tell there are quite a few methods that you can use to make your readership stick around and keep coming back to your blog. You should also keep reading the internet for other great sources because there are more ways to retain your blog readership other then the ones I listed above. You should also be trying to make your blog more enjoyable for the readers because after all the success of your blog depends solely on the readers.