CT Biz Blogs

If you have a small business and you’re thinking about blogging, one big thing you need to think about is how you want your blog to look. All the blogging applications have a way of customizing the look and feel of your blog via templates or themes.

Templates and themes (which is what WordPress calls a template) are types of “skins,” or looks that you can use to customize your blog. One of the great things about modern websites is that the functionality has been separated from the look of the sites. It’s kind of like how my Toyota RAV 4 is really a Corolla. Or is it a Camry? I can never remember.

While that may or may not be ideal for cars, it’s definitely the way to go with web sites, which is what a blog is. You separate out the things you want to have on your blog — such as search, comments, trackbacks, and so on, from the way they’re displayed.

How your blog looks is one way you can make it distinctive and “branded.” As PR and Marketing folks will tell you, this is a good idea.

Blogger, the free Google blogging application, calls these “skins” templates. With Blogger blogs, you have the ability to access the template code, and change it to your liking. Unfortunately, with WordPress.com, another free blogging application, you don’t have that choice. I imagine the main reason for that is that Blogger is owned by Google, which has a lot of money and server space.

If you have a WordPress.com blog, you can choose from the available themes, and try on as many as you like until you find the right one for you, just as you can with Blogger. You just can’t do much tweaking, unless the theme developer has included some options that are customizable, like header color or color scheme. WordPress does now have a feature called “sidebar widgets” which allows you to specify the order of items in the sidebar, and actually add or delete sidebar items. But that’s it for customizing.

WordPress.org, the host-it-yourself version (but also free!), has many more options. There are now over 900 blog themes, and it’s a simple matter to install them. You have access to the actual files, so you can do what you will to the look of the blog.

If you want to try a unique, branded look, you can hire someone to do it for you. Valorie Luther, for example, hired The Geek Goddess to create the theme for the WordPress blog for her PR company, Creative Concepts, and the Blogger template for her events planning blog, Entertaining News. The work was reasonably priced, and they look great! I know the same can be done for Typepad and other blogs, although I don’t have direct experience with those.

Or, you can be cheap and/or all do-it-yourselfy like me, and learn how to create a theme or template yourself or modify an existing theme . Many developers of themes and templates allow that. To find out, you have to check the copyright and additional information for the theme in which you’re interested

If you do it yourself, there’s a lot of good information for developers in the WordPress documentation, called the Codex. And there’s certainly plenty of free info out there, such as on the Urban Giraffe website. I actually plunked down the cash for the e-book version, and it’s well worth the $6 US it cost me.

Lorelle VanFossen’s WordPress blog is also a great resource for keeping up with WordPress.

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Technorati tags : WordPress, blogging