Lets face it, default WordPress themes, Blogger (ewwww) default themes and all Drupal themes suck. Basically any preinstalled theme on any blogging package is rubbish. So, when starting your new blog, getting a new theme is a must. If you want people to hang around your make money online blog you really need to make it appealing and attractive. You need to grab the readers attention. A boring old over used theme isn’t going to do it.
If I come across a blog with the default wordpress theme I instantly move on. The content might be good but God Damn! Your theme is depressing. When I come across a blog with an original look, I like to hang around and explore it. In doing this I’m been exposed to the blog owners content. This is what you want. I’m not saying my theme is the dogs B!^”&$*S but I’ve made an attempt to keep my theme nice and unique. I’ve taken a free WordPress theme and now I’m slowly customising it to the look I want.
You don’t have to pay mega bucks either to get yourself kitted out with a nice new theme. There are 100’s of theme sites. Yes, a lot of the themes are crap. But eventually amongst all the crap you will find a decent theme and with some customisation, you can turn a decent theme in to a brilliant theme.
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February 26th, 2008 at 2:30 am
I couldn’t agree with you more - of course, I’d probably be a bit gentler, but I don’t mind your different, more edgy approach to this subject. It’s pretty refreshing, to be honest.
I’d love to be like you and customize my theme, but I’m useless when it comes to programming. Heck, it took me an hour to figure out how to change a column from categories to posting the latests posts.
February 26th, 2008 at 2:44 am
Thanks for your comments Herbert. I just re-read my post, lol, it is a bit aggressive. I guess that’s the way I like to get my point over.
As for theme customization, all it takes is practice. If you visit tutorial sites such as pixel2life.com, you can find some handy and well written tutorials for WP customization.
As much as I’d like to, I don’t really want to publish customization tutorials on this blog. There’s so many blogs out there full of them.
One thing I will be doing in the future though, is releasing my own themes. At the moment I’m putting all my effort in to getting this blog up and running.
March 15th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
If I want to monetize my blog, should I get my own domain name? Is it possible to monetize my free blogs at wordpress.com? I appreciate your answer.
March 15th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Don’t know much about others, but can’t agree with you about drupal themes.
Of course, as there are plenty of them, you don’t like some of them.
But there are also good ones.
March 15th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
I’ve used drupal with websites before and it’s a great CMS, I was talking about using Drupal as a blogging platform, it just doesn’t look rite. I’m all for the development of Drupal and I would use it if their were some decent themes. At the moment, all of the themes I’ve come across are more suited to websites.
http://www.drupalsnippets.com/ is a site I check regularly looking for updates and such. Your site looks excellent too, you now have a new reader.
March 15th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Norma - It’s not essential to have a domain name to earn money from your blog. But, it makes your blog seem more professional. Plus, having your own domain name will make it easier for people to remember your blog.
When picking your name, try to have something that relates to the topics you discuss on your blog. Try to make it catchy so that it’s easy to remember for your readers.
(edit)
Wordpress.com doesn’t allow you to make any money. You might be better of trying to create your own blog using wordpress.org.