I am still in the process of looking around the internet to see what people are doing with their blogs to make money online. The one thing that strikes me about the blogs out there is how the design lets these blogs down. Most of the designs are appalling but the content is great and sound however the design is very lacking and I can see that many people haven’t really thought about the design and layout of their blog.

As a designer I am always looking at the design of websites and blogs, I look at how they are laid out in terms of images, advertisement placement, side bar widgets and how the text flows throughout the pages. Many bloggers make the mistake of creating a dark blog with a dark background and white text. This simply doesn’t work and makes for difficult reading. You have to keep your readers onto your site and give them an experience they will remember and therefore return to read more.

In WordPress, Blogger and Typepad choose templates that are clean and present a spacious design for easy placement of text and images. If you do choose a theme in any of these platforms try out the themes, install them test the colours and if you don’t like it then simply uninstall the theme and start again. The next best thing to do is find and install one of the many free themes available out there. These themes wouldn’t necessary be within the platforms themselves but within other websites which design and offer blog themes for free. These themes can be great, however not all of them are well designed and they limit what you can do. If you want to make an impression the best thing to do is get a paid theme and these give you great control and allow you to change things through theme forums and even other blogs.

If you have a lot of money you can always hire a website designer to design you a premium blog theme which will be a bespoke design especially for you so no one else will have one however the down side of this is that it’s expensive and you might have to call on the designer to help you with minor changes here and there and can cost.

Overall I would suggest what I have used to create this blog that you are looking at. I used the Socrates theme to product this blog and I have to say it is one of the best I have come across. I have looked at many blog themes out there and this is the best for usability, navigation, monetisation, analytics, layout, footer and header notes with loads of header and backgrounds to choose from. I would suggest looking at this, look at a short video I made about this theme.

Get the Socrates theme here