Bekka5280

researching other wp blogs

In order to have a blog that suits your needs, you need to first figure out what your needs are.

• Are you going to have a lot of pages, categories, or just a lot of posts?
• Are you going to use tags and categories to organize your posts?
• Is your blog going to be image heavy, or text heavy?
• Are you going to have a long list of links?
• How do you want people to navigate around your blog?

Take a look at the links below to other blogs, and see what kinds of things you think would work for you:

• Swiss Miss A designer living in NYC, blogs about things that ‘make her look,’ an image heavy blog
• FlickOut Contains HD streaming movie trailers, and good categorization
• Huffington Post A newspaper style blog, contains a lot of teasers on the front page
• Zen Habits A blog about living a Zen Life, it’s very popular and simple
• I Love Typography A blog devoted to all things typography, with many archives and links

To see more examples of wordpress blogs go to the Wordpress Showcase. There are literally thousands of ways to design your blog, but you first need to figure out what is important to you. Once you know what you want, you can move into the guts of the project: designing your wordpress theme.

Wordpress provides many widgets and plugins for added features. You can add calendars, tag clouds, links, recent posts, etc. Explore these as you develop your design, make sure you know what is available to you, but don’t go over the top with widgets in your sidebar. Too many ‘bells and whistles’ make a site unappealing.