It’s The Best Time Of The Year - To Clean Up Your Blog
Now that everyone is busy making preparations for the coming New Year and thinking how to outdo the cow’s party, this is one of the best times of the year to spruce up your blog. You don’t need to go out and order a whole new design, here’s a few pointers to make your blog look a lot different than it presently does.
CSS Tweaks
Editing your CSS file is probably the simplest way you can give your blog a new look. Probably the most simplest thing you can do is change your background color. If you do not have an idea what color you want to use have a look at Colour Lovers where you can browse over thousands upon thousands of colors.
Simply grab the HEX value, like #99906D, and change it in your CSS file {the background color is usually stated in the "body" tag}.
If your theme uses a background image you can visit this site to look over some great pixel backgrounds or browse through stock photo sites and look there. Simply upload the relevant image to your theme images/ folder and make sure to edit your CSS file, to call that image, and you’re done.
An example for an image as a background -
body {
background: url(’images/background.gif’) repeat;
}
The above example also depends on your image whether it is a seamless background or not.
Read more WordPress CSS tweaks.
Buttons and Icons
You can build a web 2.0 style button online quite easily. Check out this button site, though not the best looking, it can still be great for quick solutions.
If you are looking for icons there are plenty of stock image sites around like Stockxpert and iStockPhoto which sell some very nice looking icons to place on your blog. You can get icons to showcase your RSS feed, your date or just add one to give your blog some personality. Small changes can make big impressions.
Admin Changes
Have a look at your sidebar, get rid of the clutter and keep things to a minimal. Too much information is the number one cause of a high bounce rate for a blog.
Check if you are displaying too many posts on your front page. Reduce them by a few to see how you feel about it. You know you’re posts are interesting so people will want to skip over to the next page to read more. If you think your posts are not interesting…then, um…well stamp collecting is a good hobby 
So before the New Year hits make some changes to your blog and get it ready for 2008!
Guest post by Hyder from Everybody Go To
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Your forgot one: Ditch the Blogrush widget. It takes up valuable space and doesn’t contribute anything.
Unless, you know, you happen to have a massive referral network.
Some great tips here…Wishing the Cow a Happy New Year..It’s time to take over John Chow in the top 3 spots in 2008!
Digg’s comment system sucks - Officially!
Okay, okay! I know that this subject is overdone, but I felt that I needed to say my piece. Digg has taken some serious flack for their *new* comment system in the past. Users don’t like it, find it bloated and think it generally sucks!
I must sa…
And don’t forget to remove ads at the bottom of posts….
@can’t get rich -
I didn’t mention BlogRush specifically, but you get the idea
I agree with getting rid of the blogrush widget ….. i didn’t like it at all.
I think that the blogrush widgets would be more effective if they not so “in your face” and were just a simple, like adsense. They would increase the CTR by making it look just like text links.
Heh, I just updated my blog’s layout yesterday. AND I removed the blogrush widget, which was doing nothing for me. I guess I’m ready for the new year~
I did a theme update just over a month ago so im set!
I tweak my theme about once a week, and I got rid of Blogrush eons ago.
But I still have 96 credits in my inactive account…YEAH
Thanks for the nice tips Hyder , Happy new year
Great post! I need to put a lot of those things into consideration
-Mike
I never have thought about that, it’s really a great idea like house-cleaning and give a new color to your site, great post!
I updated my site with some special stuff…
Nice tips Cow, the colors site is very cool but I didn’t edit the background or sidebar, even more, I get a new domain and name, what do you think? Is a great step to start the new year isn’t it :twisted:? See you around
Is blogrush really that good because i have heard people saying that is not that useful and is wasting their space.
Thanks for the advice.
Thanks for the tips. I’m busy cleaning up my sites right now. Want to start the new year with a new look. Even got myself a haircut. <- personal css cleanup.
This is very useful especially if you want to give your viewers a new, nice and clean looks this 2008! Happy New Year
Nhick
http://www.itrush.com
Thanks for the tips guys as I was thinking about updating my site and see what changes i could make. At least now i don’t have to go and get a whole new design.
I thought I’d just chip in with another way to clean up your blog….blog spam that is! I don’t know how much spam everyone else gets, but I recently added a pre-filter to block really obvious spam, and it has drastically reduced the volume reaching filters like Askimet - which makes for much easier moderation.
Take a look at the TanTan Simple Spam filter (see profile link above). I get around 200-300 spam comment attempts per week, and since installing it, I’ve only had around 5 entries get through to Askimet (one of which was not spam), and over 420 spam blocked immediately.
Since the pre-filters used are just aimed at obvious spam, it should never block legitimate comments. But filtering out the bulk is something that shouldn’t be under-estimated, if you get a fair amount of spam attempts. Definitely one of the most handy plugins I’ve come across to date.
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Today I can see some clean up
on this blog cool
Ditto on getting rid of BlogRush. It did nothing for me. EntreCard is giving be 10 times more traffic.
nice to see you’ve done some updates, i think i need to do a few updates with my blog
Steve, the best place to put ads is a the bottome of posts. It gives us soomething to click on when we get through reading.
I agree and have been gathering quotes from a variety of different blog design companies. If only the people that designed your blog would get back to me
… then I could help make my decision.
Thanks for the resources. You know it took me 1 and a half month just to redesign my site. I do it all myself. Learn CSS, javascript. I like to do things on my own. If i don’t know I would find a way to do it. But that only cover things that I enjoy doing it. It feels good to get things done on your own. But still not satisfied enough because don’t like the way it loads. I believe I can improve more on the coding.
Some great tips here…Wishing the Cow a Happy New Year..It's time to take over John Chow in the top 3 spots in 2008!