You can always tell the difference between a ‘standard’ blog that’s hosted off blogger or wordpress and one that looks professional. Obviously the first thing that comes to mind is the themes. If you’ve got a theme at least your blog would look a bit different, if you’ve got a premium theme (one that you bought for either 20-100 dollars), then chances are none of your visitors have seen the theme before and your blog would look a whole lot more individualistic.
I gave myself a 100 dollar budget for this blog and currently I’ve got 80 more dollars to spare. That’s not bad, considering I spent 20% of the budget and already have a good looking blog. Even though the budget permitted, I’d thought I’d save a bit of cash on the theme and just get a free one. There are some others things you can do to make your blog look a bit more professional though:
Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory
The first time I installed wordpress, the root directory to access my wordpress blog was http://www.keithrozario.com/wordpress, and all other links had an ugly /wordpress in them. So the first step I did was to remove it, so to visit my blog all you had to type was http://www.keithrozario.com
Using Permalinks
Next I utilized permalinks, so instead of seeing a post as http://www.keithrozario.com/?=22 with an ugly /?=22 you’d see something more meaningful like the date of the post, e.g. http://www.keithrozario.com/2011/04/newpost
How To Install wordpress
This gives the blog a more professional feel in terms of URL. Before I forget here’s the best link for installing wordpress on nearlyfreespeech in case you guys are interested. It’s a shame he’s hosting his really great tutorial on blogspot 🙂
At least visitors don’t see an ugly /wordpress link when they access the blog, and url of my post look neater around. These small things do contribute to the blog and make it look a lot more presentable.