As a home business blogger, having excellent content is important for traffic but it is also important to have a professional looking blog to stand out from the competition and to build trust with your visitors.
A professional looking blog that is simple and easy to navigate gets often more comments than others and sometimes even rank better in search engines just because of the in-built SEO capabilities (at least in WordPress).Personally, I recommend WordPress for itīs outstanding SEO capabilities and easy to use plugins.
Everyone is not an expert in CSS coding, so the question is how to get a professional looking blog? Well, the answer is ready made blogging templates that you just upload to your hosting account.Here are the best places to get them.
WordPress Theme Viewer, a directory of 600+ great themes for WordPress users.
Bloggingtips.com has great themes for both Blogger.com and WordPress that you can download for free.
Premium WordPress Themes by Brian Gardner, these are paid professional WordPress themes are a good option for people who are taking blogging to a new level from hobby to business.
Of course, you can make a quick search on Google for “free blogging themes” and you will receive lots of results.However, downloading a theme from the wrong place and using it can result in many problems and your blog might not work properly after that.
Itīs possible that you still need assistance in installing your new professional looking blog theme.For WordPress users there is an excellent site called WordPress Max that offers tips and tools,Wordpress customization service, help for optimization and blog installation.
Update: January 3, 2009:
If you are looking to move your hosted WordPress blog (wordpress.com) to a self hosted one (wordpress.org) but have no idea of how to do this, here is the solution explained step-by-step:
How to move from WordPress.com to WordPress.org
What blogging theme do you currently use? Leave a comment.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
hay man, thanks for info. i’m really not that good with css so i need some things to help
Kevins last blog post..Creating an Aromatherapy Retail Store Online
Thanks, very helpful article
Kevin, If you don’t know about a css, but want create a themes – use this servise http://blog.html.it/layoutgala/
Hey , you have a very good blog, its excellent information in its field. You have done a great job, keep doing it for to help, people like Myself. I read many blogs earlier about this topic. But I never found complete information earlier, but your blog is giving real information. I also have several WordPress blogs. And in my experience social bookmarking, article submission and press release submission is way to quickly quickly get my blog posts spidered and am on page one of Google many times in a few hours .
I couldn’t agree more. It looks like you have the perfect combination. Great content on a regular bases with an easy to navigate layout that looks nice and professional. I’m a big fan of the news and magazine themes.
Brian D. Hawkinss last blog post..Sharing My Friend List
Hi Brian, thanks for stopping by.I like the Wordpress revolution themes very much.It has all the qualities Iīm looking for in a theme.