This started as a comment reply to Sterling’s question: “So, you don’t like Kubrick? It doesn’t offend me, but I’ll give some thought to improvements. What suggestions do you have?”

The problem with the default Wordpress template isn’t the template itself, the theme is alright, it’s that the people with their own blogs — the ones who read them all the time and will link to your blog (and I suspect you’d like that) — will recognize the use of a default template as a familiar indicator of splog/spam. Which would be 100% wrong in Sterling’s case and many others out there, I’m afraid.

How to distance your blog from spammers/sploggers
- Don’t use too many ad units to content, particularly contextual ads. Three contextual ads on a page with a lot of content is fine, but three on a linkblog entry with one sentence is too much. A word count to ads shown on page snippet of code should help.
- Most splog sites don’t bother to customize their sites (design, logo, icons, etc) so do the opposite
- Most splog/spam sites aren’t personalized. Place an author bio and/or picture near the top and add a post about who you are and what you do.
- always design your own logo (worth repeating)
- buy your own domain. Be careful when using third party free blog hosting services
- splogs are cluttered with big paragraphs of text with one link in a very obvious format, so vary text sizes, include images at seemingly random locations and placement
- include an author byline for each post with a name — it’s amazing how many splogs don’t have bylines. With a byline readers instantly can identify with who wrote the post. IMO, the byline shouldn’t be at the bottom so the reader has to scroll to find out who is writing. Some think: hey it’s obvious every blog post is by me because it’s my personal blog, but the reality is new readers don’t know who is talking. It also puts the persons name in a prominent location near the title where it belongs. The byline is important, it should be near the headline at the top so readers can say: ahh, this one is by Mr. E. And at the top it will be related in the SE also.
- reference your blog name and/or domain in the posts once in awhile. Not every post, not every day, but enough so that readers will realize they aren’t reading the content at the original source. Abbreviations work in place of longer names (variation throws off splogger algos), like I use Hmm to describe MakeYouGoHmm. If you are reading this on any other blog than makeyougohmm.com — and it’s not a fair use quote with link attribution — then it was almost definitely used without the copyright owner’s permission and consent.

What other templates/themes to use?
As for other templates to use? Wordpress just finished a theme design contest so I bet some good ones are there to be had. Changing a template in WP is pretty easy, as Sterling probably already discovered, just download the template upload in your wp-themes folder and then go to the admin area and change to the new template.

One of my friends who is a blogger uses a template switcher plugin (anybody have the link?) so that users can change the template to the one that they like, so one could also try something like that and see which one your readers like best (just a thought). My only other advice would be make the text easy to read and big for us old timers with crappy eyes. Dark backgrounds with white text are hard on the eyes for text, but good for images. So you might have to tweak the CSS of a template to get a more readable font.

I’m one of the last people that should be giving any web graphic/design advice but I would pick something, anything that you haven’t seen used much out there and add your own custom logo instead of Kubrick. You want people to come to the site and get an immediate sense of it being different and unique then the gadzillions of other blogs out there. Some readers that are also bloggers won’t get past the design if they catch the scent of spam

I’ve recommended (see rotating banners up top) — bought and use — the Logo Creator program to generate logos for some of our sites (see our VTOR logo for an example). You can also buy the Logo Creator program ($19.95) at your local Best Buy or CompUSA. It’s well worth the money IMO and can produce pro-quality logos at an affordable price.

I’ll see if I can add a few more thoughts to this morning’s upcoming Hmmcast about all this but no promises. Today is moving fast.

Hopefully the point isn’t lost here that the first thing to do when you start your new blog is to change the theme and create a custom logo. Those two simple steps will put you instantly a step above the spammer/splogger who couldn’t be bothered to take the time. Beyond that, start writing great content. Happy blogging to you.

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