Mapping out a new blog: Choosing a great theme and some killer plugins

Hun­dreds of blogs are made every­day. There are the blog­gers who take time to pre­pare a blog by doing things like plan­ning out a mar­ket­ing strat­egy, writ­ing posts for the future, and find­ing all plu­g­ins. Then there are blog­gers who do not take those impor­tant steps. A suc­cess­ful blog will take more than 5 min­utes of plan­ning. Whether it be 5 hours, 5 weeks, or 5 months. 5 min­utes just won’t cut it.

Find­ing the theme for your blog

It’s bor­ing to use the default Word­Press theme on your blog. The theme kind of sucks in my eyes after see­ing it so much, and I am cer­tainly not the only per­son who thinks that. You have to find a theme for your blog, whether it be cus­tom or premade.

Find­ing the best pre­made theme for your blog

A pre­made theme is a theme made by another that is either released free, or for a fee. It is more com­mon to see a pre­made theme then a cus­tom theme IMO, because many new blog­gers either don’t have the expe­ri­ence, money or knowl­edge to get a cus­tomized theme.

Great free pre­made themes

• WordPress.org themes
• Themes from Design Disease
• Smash­ing Magazine’s list of 100 excel­lent Word­Press themes
• Skin­Press Word­Press themes

The one down­side to hav­ing a pre­made themes is it won’t be unique to you. Other will be allowed to use the theme, so in that aspect it doesn’t make your blog 100% unique.

Find­ing your­self a cus­tom Word­Press theme

A cus­tom theme is unique to your blog, and you will be the only per­son to have it. You can get cus­tom themes through free­lancers, or you can do it your­self for free.

Great places for a cus­tom theme

• Free­lance designer James McDon­ald from Flockey.com makes amaz­ing web designs, and he has been design­ing a lot of blogs recently. I believe he is still run­ning his Christ­mas Spe­cial where he is offer­ing Word­Press design for $200. Check him out.
• Unique Blog Designs is an extremely pop­u­lar blog design com­pany that have done many blog designs. They have worked for peo­ple like John Chow, Shoe­Money, and so many more. They do a great job, and if you’re get­ting really seri­ous about your blog, then you can’t go wrong with UBD.
• Design the theme your­self with no CSS/HTML/PHP knowl­edge needed. I found this really cool Word­Press Theme Gen­er­a­tor. It has a lot of great fea­tures with a live pre­view, so when you change some­thing it will show you what the changes look like. It is lim­ited in some ways of what it can do, but at least you can say you made your theme!
• Kolakube will design a theme. Tsk tsk for shame­less self pro­mo­tion, but I do offer cus­tom Word­Press themes from the Ser­vices page.

Fit­ting the right plu­g­ins into your blog

Plu­g­ins are made to alter your blog. Whether it is adding new fea­tures to it, or increas­ing the user inter­ac­tiv­ity of your blog, plu­g­ins are a must have for any blog.

I believe that there are two kinds of cat­e­gories in plu­g­ins. The first cat­e­gory are plu­g­ins with rela­tion to your blog. For exam­ple, if you ran an edu­ca­tional blog, it would be smart to find plu­g­ins that have rela­tion to what­ever sub­ject you talk about.

Then there is the sec­ond cat­e­gory, and that is the plu­g­ins that every blog must have. Plu­g­ins that help your SEO, or improve post struc­tures, and so much more. These plu­g­ins are found on tons of blogs all through­out the blo­gos­phere, and are used effec­tively to help you become a bet­ter blogger.

Cat­e­gory 1: Plu­g­ins with rela­tion to your blog

There just too many blog niche’s to make a list of plu­g­ins for, so I have com­piled a short list for you on how to find plu­g­ins related to your niche.

• Check out what other blog­gers use in your niche. While there is a fine line between copy­ing and get­ting inspi­ra­tion, there are always a few pop­u­lar plu­g­ins within every niche.
• Browse through the WordPress.org Plu­g­ins direc­tory. Just go through some pages and look at all of the plu­g­ins. Look far­ther than the descrip­tion of the plu­gin, how can you use that spe­cific plu­gin to do some­thing unique and different?
• Just because the plu­gin says it does one thing, doesn’t mean it has to do just one thing. If you can think of an idea to use a plu­gin for more than what it says, imple­ment it in the best way pos­si­ble. If you need to edit the code, try pay­ing an expe­ri­enced pro­gram­mer to do so for you. If you need a few other plu­g­ins to do it, then get those plu­g­ins. The plu­gin sys­tem Word­Press has is lim­it­less, and there’s really noth­ing you can’t do!

Cat­e­gory 2: Plu­g­ins every blog must have

Besides hav­ing plu­g­ins with rela­tion to your niche, there are plu­g­ins you must have in order to cre­ate a bet­ter blog. Whether those plu­g­ins are for SEO pur­poses, or just make the blog more user friendly, they are absolutely needed. Out of those plu­g­ins, there are 7 in par­tic­u­lar you should have. You have prob­a­bly seen most of these before.

• Akismet Anti-Spam Sys­tem. Pro­tects your blog from spam. This is the best spam plu­gin around, and the only one you will ever need.
• WP Super Cache. Speeds up your blog. Some say it can make your blog Digg proof, and the plu­gin even claims it. I always won­dered if it were really true.
• Google XML Sitemap Gen­er­a­tor. Cre­ates a sitemap of your entire blog. A must have SEO plu­gin, has many options and is explained well so even the most inex­pe­ri­enced user can use it with ease.
• WP-DB-Backup. Back­ups the data­base when­ever you want, you can get back­ups sent to your email if you want.
• Feed­Burner Feed­Smith. Redi­rects all users to your Feed­Burner RSS Feed so you can get a more accu­rate num­ber of subscriptions.
• Plat­inum SEO Pack. An SEO plu­gin that does every­thing All In One SEO does, but has even more options.
• Word­Press Auto­matic Upgrade. Auto­mat­i­cally updates your Word­Press ver­sion. This is on the list because so many peo­ple com­plain about upgrad­ing too often. This cuts the time it takes to upgrade in half.

Final Thoughts & Wrap Up

So to briefly go over the post, themes and plu­g­ins are nec­es­sary for your blog. There are many ways to get them both, and many ways to cus­tomize them. If you run a blog with­out either of them, then you won’t have a suc­cess­ful blog. The design is there to make your site appeal to users, and to dis­play your con­tent in an orga­nized way. Then there are plu­g­ins, and their pur­pose is to add new fea­tures to your blog.

So how impor­tant do you think a good theme and plu­g­ins are? Let me know, I’d love to hear from you!

Go to top