Your blog is competing with millions of other websites for attention. You have mere seconds to make that all important first impression, mess up and you might as well pack up and learn to knit. What can you do to make a great lasting impression?

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In my Previous post I provided some ideas for how with a bit of PHP programming magic you can add some oomf to your ads. I got a bit of feedback that people would like more ideas, so here I am with a part 2!

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As promised in Part One of How To Customize WordPress, this time I thought I would attempt to see how simple it can be to tweak an existing WordPress template using some CSS.

A lot of the more frequently used existing blog templates have only a 2 Column design, and are quite narrow at that so trying to get some whitespace and an extra column into one of them is the challenge I set myself.

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There are a lot of Flash Designers in the world today, and it is a certainty that some of them have blogs, and although pages containing Flash might look fantastic, does it really help a blog or hinder it?

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There are two main ways that I can see to go about customising themes in WP. I'm not really a theme user, as I tend to build from scratch, so it's difficult for me to say which way would be easier for everyone. One way is to customise the functionality of the blog itself this involves getting into the "Loop" (more on this later), the other is just to build around the existing CSS of an already stable theme. There is a lot you can do by just dissecting your chosen base theme and using the CSS to do the work.

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After noticing some very enjoyable trends in design recently, I got to thinking about how following the fashion trend, this time around anyway, might just help professional bloggers.

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You'll want to make it easy and comfortable for your readers to use your blog, because only then will they feel comfortable with you as an authority on your subject, and a trusted source in your niche. With that in mind, here are 10 easy things you can do to make your blog more usable.

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The relative newness of using blogs for commerce, for professional blogging means only one thing in design terms - Branding - It is ultimately how you brand the end
product that is what will sell it, and Branding is more than just the design.

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With web design, and thus blog design, I think the concept of "less is more", and particularly, the use of White Space is horribly neglected.

Often I find commercial, professional blogs to be cluttered, and difficult to read due to ads, gimmicks, extraneous navigation and other confusing, real-estate-hogging extras. And the thing is, you're ads and navigation could actually work much better when designed with simplicity in mind.

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I was thinking about blog design as i trawled around with nothing much todo late last night, and thought i'd try to make two lists. This one, what makes a blog look cheap, and what makes a blog look professional - negative one first eh? Here's what for me, makes a blog look cheap and nasty...

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Last week we had a great discussion on Favicons (funny that a 16x16 pixel graphic would be the hottest discussion on Performancing thus far). But the theories behind the differing opinions were interesting: should you skip the little things, so you can spend all your time writing content, or is it OK to 'waste' hours (days?) making sure everything on your blog is perfect?

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I don't know about you, but I spend a lot of time on the design of my blogs. I don't take a template and slap it up on my server, install wordpress and call it a day. One of the more important features of running a blog is making it unique. That is not just the content of the site but the design of it as well.

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The state of navigational links on blogs is getting out of hand. If you're blog's purpose is to make money, why do we insist on distracting our readers with hundreds of useless links?

Your blog should guide your reader to where she wants to go, or to allow her to discover where she wants to go. By placing huge lists of links in side navigation, or cramming the bottom of your posts with social bookmarking javascript links, you only make it harder for her complete her task.

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For those of you who haven’t heard of Favicons before, they are the tiny icons that sometimes sit in the address bar of your browser, immediately next to a URL. They aren’t really something I have previously given a great deal of attention to. However, Favicons are one of many blog design considerations that have recently cropped up in my thinking.

As a result I found myself asking the following questions:

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As I mentioned in a previous post about template design, colour scheme considerations are at the forefront of my mind at the moment. Probably too much at the forefront! But, just delving a little deeper into this topic I found some fascinating insights about how the psychology of colour can possibly imply certain things about your blog. Now, I don’t profess to be a protagonist of psychology, in fact I err on the side of being cynical in most instances, but there does seem to be something about the connotations of certain template colours that rings true with me. I have summarised some of the principal implications below:

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