Zen Zoomie’s Place: Chronicles of a (Wannabe) Pro Blogger

If you had been able to watch this blog over the past several days (not likely since we just made our way into the major search engines and blog directories yesterday!), you would have seen a LOT of changes. Zen Zoomie’s Place officially opened for business on June 20^th, 2007, but since then I’ve been researching, tweaking, optimizing, adjusting, and breaking (!) the site with Wordpress virtually non-stop. Since this site is all about building a successful blog from the ground-up, I made a conscious decision to put it online as soon as I had a working shell, so that you could benefit from the lessons I learn in the process of “tweaking” the design. I’ve been feeling the pain of that decision as I try to balance writing new content for this blog with the time it’s taking me to adjust the site’s look, feel, and functionality to something that’s appropriate for a “revenue generating” blog.

Lucky for me, Wordpress turns out to be a very powerful and customizable platform, and it makes applying a new look and feel to your site relatively easy through the use of “Themes”. You can browse a ton of available Wordpress themes at themes.wordpress.net. In order to use the new themes, you simply ftp a copy of the files to your themes directory (/wp-content/themes/NEWTHEMEDIRECTORY). Once you’ve uploaded the files, you can change the look and feel of your website by going to the Presentation tab of the Wordpress administration dashboard (usually accessed at www.yourblog.com/wp-admin). The official Wordpress instructions for using themes are located here. I personally went through at least a dozen themes before finding one that satisfies most (still not all) of my desires. I eventually settled on what I think is a very nice theme called the Copyblogger theme based on Brian Clark’s excellent Copyblogger website.

There are several key factors you need to consider when choosing from the 1000+ available Wordpress themes that are available.

1. Is the theme compatible with the version of Wordpress that you are running? Did you check for comments from other users of the theme to verify that there aren’t any major issues? Does the theme author have a good track record for updating their themes in a timely manner to fix any problems created when a new version of Wordpress is released? More popular themes are at an advantage here, but if you choose one of the most popular themes, your website will also suffer from look-like syndrome unless you do additional personalization yourself.

2. Is the theme “widgetized” or “widget ready”? This is extremely important if you want to be able to adjust the look and feel of your sidebars without having to make significant changes to the actual code for your website. If the theme is widgetized, you can simply drag and drop popular add-ins where you would like them to appear. This is key if you want to place affiliate or other advertisements on your website.

3. Was the theme designed to be standards compliant? (To ensure it will display properly on the widest possible range of web-browsers and platforms)

4. Does the theme incorporate search engine friendly design features (i.e. is the design based on the principles of search engine optimization or SEO)?

5. Was the theme designed to be easily customizable? This is important if you want to be able to tweak a popular theme to create your own unique blog look and feel.

6. Was the theme designed to facilitate easy placement of revenue-generating affiliate ads? Www.doshdosh.com has a list of 18 Adsense optimized Wordpress themes here to get you started.

Finally, if you don’t want your blog to look like a work in progress, I suggest creating a second installation of Wordpress to test out your new ideas before making them “live” on your website. If you’re using Bluehost or another similar hosting solution, you can create sub-domains to your heart’s content at no additional cost. Just create a new sub-domain for your “test” Wordpress installation (such as wp_test.yourwebsite.com) and you can play around as much as you like without “showing your ugly” to the world.

Good blogging,