The Basics of Customizing Your New Blog

Customizing your new blog is the best way to make sure your blog suits your style, market, and goals.

Ensuring your blog looks, feels, and functions properly according to what your goals are will help your site be more successful. 

By making the layout and design complement your market and objectives, you will create a searchable, accessible, and enjoyable website

Ultimately, by tailoring your blog you’ll make it truly yours.

WordPress Customization

When customizing your new blog, you’ll want to consider a few basics to get started.

First, you’ll want to consider using WordPress, as it makes blogs easy to start, customize, and manage. This enables you to personalize your page how you want it.

You’ll want to choose a WordPress theme to let you customize your page and tailor it to your audience. While creating, you will want to consider what types of plugins you will want to add, whether or not you want to use a header, and how to format your page with different colors and fonts.

WordPress Themes

WordPress is one of the most popular ways of building a successful blog, and there’s a reason. Many of the WordPress parent themes have a variety of child themes that can be used to further customize and stylize your page.

WordPress offers a plethora of theme types and styles that offer various features such as alternative home page layouts, interactive post sliders, and mobile compatibility. You can even filter your search to ensure you only look at themes that already have the features you want, like mobile compatibility or theme support.

Mobile & Responsive

In today’s market, you will almost always want a mobile-responsive theme so that your page will function seamlessly for mobile users as well.

• WordPress.com has a range of free themes you can choose from.
• If those aren’t to your liking, you can choose from a selection of more advanced, premium themes.
• You will also want to filter your search for specific features you want, such as mobile-responsive themes.

Widgets and Menus

In order to make the most of your page you may want to incorporate widgets and menus.

Obviously, a menu is a great way to help with navigation. But you can also tailor the navigation of your blog by using widgets as well.

If you use widgets that suit your target audience and theme, you will be able to use them to help your users find more of what they need, creating a more enjoyable user experience. This will get more people using your page and – more importantly – returning to it.

When creating menus and adding widgets, don’t get carried away. You always want to think of how your audience will read and navigate your page. If you use widgets and menus well on your page, this should help you not only customize your page, but make the experience great for your followers.

These are the best ways to alter and specialize your page without adding plugins. For more on widgets as well as how to set them up, click here.

If you want support with making a custom menu, you should click here.

Plugins

Plugins are a great way to extend the features of your website by adding to it. By adding plugins to your page, you offer users more features that customize their experience, making it easier, catered, and more enjoyable.

Through WordPress you can search for a variety of different plugins using targeted keywords, allowing you to find the type of plugin you want. There is a wide range of plugins available that offer a number of features, and you will want to search for things that align with your website and your goals.

If you are publishing an RSS feed, you will definitely want to use Google’s FD Feedburner Plugin. It hosts your blog’s feed and gives you statistics to help you monitor how many people are reading your blog. This will save you bandwidth and let you manage your blog effectively.

If you want to manage your account with more settings and information, you will also want to use the WordPress.com Stats plugin. This gives you current statistics inside your WordPress dashboard, so you can get the information while updating your blog. It will give you information about which of your posts are most popular.

Conclusion

Let’s face it; despite how incredible we think our personal blogs are, even the most interesting of us will only see a moderate following.

If you’re a business or your blog is simply growing in user base, and you start to have a lot of followers consistently watching your content, you may want to consider ensuring your blog runs smoothly even with a lot of traffic.

WP SuperCache is a great plugin for making sure your blog can always handle the traffic, even if you all of a sudden get linked from a major website.

Another plugin you probably will need if you have a lot of traffic is Akismet.

This plugin will help monitor and eliminate spam for you. This will help weed out comments that drag your blog down by ruining the atmosphere and upsetting your audience.

Having a plugin do this for you will make managing your comments much easier, but it will also automatically catch spam for you so it doesn’t even hit – or hinder – your page.

By utilizing this simple guide you will be on your way to customizing your new WordPress blog.

If you are just getting started with WordPress and want to learn more about creating a custom website you can join my free blog academy.