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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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