Choosing the Right Template for your Blog.

There are a few things that you need to know while choosing your blog template:

• Know exactly what youre blog is going to be about. The theme of your blog is what every user that visits your site is going to see. It shapes the decisions that you make in the future with your blog. As you can tell with this blog, my theme is quite simple and not too flashy because I dont want to distract you from the true message I am sending…which is “read my content.”
• Begin with a simple two-column template. If you have not chosen what template style you want, I would suggest that you start out with a template that has two columns because you might not have enough information to fill out 3 columns for a while. Notice that my blog has just started at this point and I only have two columns, but I am finding banners all over the place to put up there. Slowly but surely ill get up to the “three-column experience.”
  • 2 Column vs. 3 Column Templates. This is a good macro-level decision because it helps divide your theme choices. While there’s exceptions, my readers told me that in general they prefer two columns over three. They said it’s a cleaner reading area, easier to know where to focus and it’s simple to scroll the full page and see posts/pages on the left and the navigation/ads on the right. If you go with a three column theme then there’s a few issues. Overall, try to find a theme where the column for posts is around two-thirds of the page and the two sidebars add up to around one-third. In general, for three columns, my users preferred a column on the left and a column on the right with posts in the middle, versus two columns on the right.
• Font combinations for titles, body, and sidebar. According to my users fonts and typography matters a lot. This includes font size, family and colors. This ones tough and can vary a great deal. You need to evaluate both Initial impact and readability over time. Again, unless you’re a designer, you’ll need to compare your gut reaction to different examples and test with your users. For the main post text, What I did find was that, in general, my users preferred a white or off-white background, with dark gray font (versus black) and Verdana font. They also prefer the post titles to clearly stand out, at least in size and style (for example Trebuchet or Ariel.)
• Effective use of images. Choosing images for banners and posts made a dramatic difference in how my focus group responded to some themes.
• Effective banner design. This can make or break the initial impact of your theme.
• Comment support. Some themes host user comments better than others. It really helps when you find a live example with many comments. That way you can see how well it scales while maintaining readability.
• Effective use of whitespace. My users pretty consistently commented on how effective whitespace really made some themes seem cleaner than others. I think the biggest factor here was spacing between blog sections and elements.
• Links. My users told me they prefer links that are easy to spot versus get lost in the text, but that don’t steal the show. They also told me they prefer underlined links in posts, but don’t underline in the sidebar (for example, categories, tag cloud, recent posts, … etc.)
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I did notice that some themes seem optimized for SEO more than others. While my user’s didn’t notice this, search engines will. I think the main thing to pay attention across templates is how they use the title, description and header tags. You can tailor how your results will show up in search results. For categories, you should use permanent links. This improves your URLs for the search engine using more meaningful words. You should put your posts in only one category to avoid duplicate content from the search engine view. You should also only show parts of each post when browsing categories, to also avoid duplicate content (as well as make it easier for a human to quickly scan all your posts in a category.) See The Blogger’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization – by Aaron & Giovanna Wall and Search Engine Optimization for Blogs – SEO.