by Patricia Mayo

A couple days ago a good buddy, Mike Davis, said to me, “Trisha, my blog sucks. My blogging sucks. I look at yours and it’s all so cool. How can I be more like you?”

Photo by Dave Dyet

What you see now on GlobalCitizenExperiment.com is the product of about 6 hours of lighthearted work. I didn’t bother taking a “before” screenshot - trust me, it was a real eyesore. There’s still more to do, but we’re already pretty close to that “pretty ‘n pro” look.

Before - A Blogging Nightmare

Mike is long-winded, and the theme he had before gave him a relatively tiny column for his endless babble. He wasn’t using the “more” tag, the widgets frequently overflowed from their boxes and overlapped the content - it was just awful.

On top of that, the theme itself was a gloomy and monotone black, gray, and dark green. It still doesn’t look all that awesome because his style needs help. However, I have put into place a few tricks to help ramp up his game with very little extra effort.

That Perfect Theme

Mike wanted three columns. I told him no because he needs more room for content. If you can’t control yourself and hit the Enter key after two or three lines, then you need to give yourself a bit more room to make the content at least look light.

When I was looking for a theme, my top priorities were two columns, graphically heavy, and neat typographical formatting. For Mike, the theme itself will need to do most of the work in making it visually appealing because he is a busy professional and can’t spend a lot of time on post-production.

So, the blockquotes, lists, sidebar, graphics, and headers had to be ultra cool with color, spice, and everything nice. I wasn’t worried about the actual colors of the theme, you can always change those - all I wanted was the formatting already in place so I didn’t have to wrap things to make ‘em look neat.

Now when Mike blogs, he doesn’t have to do much except use those special formats to spice up the content and lighten the reader’s load.

Next Up, Spice Advice

A theme can’t do everything to improve your style. You still have to be a better blogger. I actually spend more time making each post look better than I do writing.

The writing itself is just one pillar of a great blog. There’s a lot more involved. Don’t worry though - I’ll spill the beans on hacking your blogging style in the rest of this “Pillars of a Great Blog” series. See ya next time!

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Trisha, @mayobrains on Twitter