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Pro Blog Design

Advice for blog owners and designers on making a more attractive, usable and ultimately profitable blog.

Should You Use a Photo as your Twitter Picture?October 7

Everyone seems to be on Twitter these days. Or on Plurk. Or Gravatar. Or MyBlogLog. Or Digg. Or Votetime. Or one of the million other social sites out there.

And all of those sites use an image on your profile. But what sort of image works best?

A photo of yourself? Or your logo? Or just a cool design?

Why Use A Photo?

• Much more personal. The idea behind sites like Twitter and Gravatar is to get closer to your readers; to form bonds and have a regular conversation with them. Using your photo is the easiest step towards making things more friendly, and simply put, more human.
• Anyone can do it. Not everyone is a designer, or has the money to hire one. But anyone can pull out a camera, snap a photo and upload it. If you don't think your logo

25 Ways to Spice Up Blog Post PhotosSeptember 29

Images enhance the visual impact of a blog and make it more likely a post will be read. One good photo can grab a reader's attention and drive them to the article.

A post without any graphs, drawing, or photos can look daunting. Even if it's well written, the wall of text might not appeal to anyone. A good image is often a must-have for a great post.

But sometimes the images available for publishing are poor quality, or just don't suit quite right.

With the tricks below, you can use Photoshop to fix up your images in minutes. Instead of a dull photo, you can liven it up to an image that might actually appeal to someone.

Strong Focus for Killer Portraits

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How Do Cheaters Redesign And Still Win?September 25

Photo by Robinsan

It takes a lot of work to redesign a blog. More time than you might have at the minute.

But your blog is starting to feel stale and the little things that always annoyed you about it are finally getting to you, so what can you do?

Fix just one thing.

At the start of this year, I knew Pro Blog Design was getting in need of some help. I didn't have the time for a complete redesign though, and the situation wasn't dire yet. I just needed to tide things over and buy myself some time, so I redesigned the sidebar.

In short, I cheated. But it worked.

Redesign One Thing, Not Everything

When a reader visits a blog day after day, they get used to it. They know how the home page is going to look, they know what they will find in the sidebar and they know what decorations to expect around their comments.

The familiarity does wonders in helping them get around your site quickly, but there are no surprises for them. There's none of the spar

Make a Google Custom Search For Your Blog, and Make MoneySeptember 15

Do you know that every time a person searches your blog you could make money?

Follow this tutorial and you'll be surprised.

Why should you use Google Custom Search?

Because the WordPress search function isn't the best. WordPress just lists every post with the search terms in it, with no priority given to the most relevant posts. Also, WordPress search doesn't allow you to make money from it, but Google Search does.

In this tutorial I am going to show you how to create your own Google custom search and make money with it.

Step-by-Step Instructions

1 - Start by creating a page were you want to show the search results. Go to your  WordPress menu and select Write > Page.

Give the page a title like "Search Results". Don't enter any content now. Deactivate the comments and pings, and publish the page. After that click "View Page" and copy the URL from your browser's address bar and save it somewhere for later.

Building a Wiki EmpireSeptember 1

As a Pro Blog Design reader, you've mastered the art of building blogs, but I want to introduce you to another form of managing information, the wiki. Certainly, you've seen Wikipedia and may even have contributed your writing to some of the articles. If so, then you know how easy it is to organize information with a wiki. You also may have noticed that Wikipedia tends to rank high in search engines. There are several reasons for this, but my theory is that the information is not only useful, but it also has a lot of internal links that may help articles reach the all-important Google top 10.

Let me start by saying that there are several hosting packages for wikis currently, such as wikia.com. I do not recommend going with these “wiki farms” because you will have no ownership of the wiki. You won't be able to customize your site as much and you'll be at the mercy of the whims of the wiki farmer. Most wiki farms will keep some or all of the advertising revenue. Plus, what happens if the wiki farm goes out of business? Basically by going with a wiki farm you have no ownership and no control over your destiny. Don't build someone else's wiki empire when you can start your own.

The first step to building your wiki empire is choosing y