Choosing Your Blog Template

I am no web graphic artist or designer but I’m gonna post a few quick tips here anyway. No it doesn’t have anything to do about tweaking your template or anything, just a few guidelines on the choice of template and telltale signs of which templates just won’t work.

Of course we all want very nice templates. We love templates that catches our readers attention. The more kickass a template looks, the more excited we get. However, even in the internet, function has to be more important than form. The only place that this adage doesn’t work is when you’re a supermodel. In which case it doesn’t matter if there’s no substance as long as the form is there. I do have a feeling that not a few model types would agree to this though.

Nevertheless, what I mean about function being more important is this. No matter how beautiful the template that you’ve chosen looks, there is one cardinal test that the template has to pass for it to be acceptable.

LOADING TIME

- the template should be fast loading. Fast-loading is any number of seconds that’s acceptable to you; hopefully nothing more than 10 seconds or 15 seconds if you’re a dial-up user. Really long loading times is a major turn-off no matter how pretty the template you’ve chosen is. Also, it would be best if your content loads first before your sidebar. Your readers are there for your content and not your sidebar. If the sidebar loads first, your reader might think that you’re just trying to sell him something and move on. I’ve seen really colorful blogs that only loads skeletons. The content follows after a looong wait. Not cool at all.

When choosing your template as well, you need to have a good idea as to what you want to do. Some templates are optimized for adsense and some are optimized for search engines. These are thing that you need to take into consideration when deciding which templates to choose.

Once you have this in mind, it’s then easy to make a search in Google. I would suggest that when you do your search, especially for free blog templates, you put in a more specific phrase. Personally I put in the year, say 2009, and then the feature I want for my template. You might also want to include free in your search phrase.  Example: free seo optimized wordpress template 2009

More often than not I look for templates that are search engine optimized. I’m not really one for adsense-optimized templates because I usually put my adsense code in the body of my posts. Better conversions that way. Studies have shown that most folks who browse blogs are blind to ads in a blog’s sidebar or in the header. So it’s not very important for me.

Another really important factor I consider when choosing free blogger templates is the typography used by the template. Some templates use really small fonts, and if you’re not very familiar with HTML, you will have some problems increasing the size of your fonts.

The background color of the template should also be considered. I find that a white background is the easiest to blend my adsense code in. But if you must have a colorful background, at least learn how to blend in your adsense blocks with the background. You can check the colors used in your blog’s stylesheet.

To summarize, here are some factors that you should consider when you choose your blog’s template:

1. Loading time
2. Typography
3. Background Color
4. SEO optimized template
5. Widget ready – no need to explain.

As to whether you should get a 2-column or 3-column or magazine type template, that is your prerogative.

Man this is some work. I have read almost all the how to’s on painless beta blogger migrations to wordpress and I have to say this is excruciating work! Still after having finally done it, everything seems worth the hours spent in front of my computer. A lot of the experts agree on two things to do the migration but with usually the same goal/s in mind– ensuring that the previous links don’t get broken and all that google juice and pagerank will not go to waste.

In my previous free blog I have already cranked up the PR meter to PR4 and have managed to land in the first page of some very competitive keywords. The problem was I was using a free account. I really should have started with a dotcom from the very start. Had I done that, I wouldn’t have to go through all the research I did in order to migrate successfully.

But still, there is a silver lining in all of these. Had I started with a dotcom from the get go, I wouldn’t have learned about 301/302 redirects, .htaccess, and all those meta tags redirect methods that a lot of experts were betting their nuts on as surefire remedies to the pain of migration.

The first instructions I did consider was Techcounter’s instructions, but the loooongg queu of questions scared the heck out of me. Then there were a lot of others in between before I arrived at bloggerbloke’s site. At first I had it made with his very nifty .htaccess system. It really worked for him and I think for others too. Even I was convinced I had it down pat. I typed my redirected blog address and voila, I was taken to blogger’s redirect page and then eventually to this site. It’s all good, except that in bloggerbloke’s case, there’s none of that temporary blogger stop.

I was prepared to live with it until I clicked on some of the permalinks pointing to my own blog. It did the usual redirect and ended up with a 404 error. I kinda slipped back down to earth after that. I had to play my final ace. I tapped on the great Wordpress reserve for help. And there it was, the plug-in created by Sam Wong — the Blogger Redirector. I installed the template and removed the .htaccess code I pasted earlier. Everything worked real well after that. Including the permalinks.

I have already placed the noindex,nofollow meta in my old blog hoping that I won’t be penalized for duplicate content. I’ll also try to do a little 302 redirect so the search engines would know that I have moved to a new location and then later on will do the permanent 301 redirect.

Right now, my concern is how to get out of that blogger temporary stop when any of my link or my url is typed. I also have to work a little bit harder promoting this site. Also some of my internal links (of course they came with the migration) are still pointing to the old blog! I still have to see if there’s a quicker way of changing these internal links behaviour so they will recognize their new location. However I only have very few internal links to modify in case I decide to do everything manually.

It may take me a couple of weeks more to finally say that I have moved successfully and comfortably here in my self-hosted Wordpress. But I’m not really that worried. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

If you happen to be here and you have some questions about migration, shoot me a note, I may not be an expert yet but with all the internet literature I’ve read and the kinks I’ve encountered, I may just be able to offer a few insights.

Cheers!