Archive for September, 2009
If you guys read my last DatMoney Weekly Updates post and you should know I’m dipping my feet into designing my own Wordpress themes. So, I have a very simple question, do you prefer one, two, three or four column blog templates? And while we’re discussing this, what exactly do you look or in a blog theme?
How Many Columns Do you Like on Your Blog?
Personally, I’m a three column blog template type of blogger. I like it because I usually have a lot of things on the sidebar and I don’t really want my readers to have to scroll down too much to see everything else on the sidebar. Although, I have been testing out two and four column templates as well just to see how they look but so far, I still prefer the three column templates.
If you had to pick on how many columns your blog template has, what would your number be? Does it even matter to you? And while we’re on the subject, what else do you look for when you’re picking your blog template?
What I Look for in a Blog Template
I think when it comes down to it, I get a little too picky for my own good. But here are a few things that I look for in a blog template.
Header - I like a blog template that has a header that runs across the top of the blog with an option of having the entire header being your logo or half of it as your logo and an ad spot or even a search option.
3 Columns - Like I mentioned, I tend to favor three column but particularly the main content area on the left hand side and the two other sidebar columns on the right side. The reason why is simply the fact that we read from left to right (most of us) and I like when people are looking at my content first and then everything else on the right after.
I think I’m going to continue and try to add one free blogger template every week that has been recently converted from Wordpress to Blogger for those of you guys that rather blog on Blogger blogs. Personally, I still work on some Blogger blogs as well, especially when I’m testing things out.
And yes, testing things out also include doing things that your hosting server won’t allow you to do. 
Anyways, this week we’re adding the fourWPTP Blogger template for you guys. I actually like it because it is a four column template so its good for you guys that have lots of things on your sidebars. I like it because it gives you a lot of space to put ads, widgets, etc all on the sidebar so your readers won’t have to scroll down forever just to see everything else… especially those ads.
Check out the screenshot of the fourWPTP template to see if you guys like it.
As we continue with our DatMoney weekly updates and our plan to conquer the world take our online business to the next level, we want more changes and more projects to take on.
In this weekly update, there are some that I forgot to include in the last one so I’ll just mention it here. There’s nothing really drastic, just a few small things.
Read More… Please? - I have been adding the “read more” on most of my posts that are somewhat longer. I did this for a few reasons: a) so my homepage doesn’t require you to scroll down like 5 mins, b) to get my bounce rate lower, c) to get more impressions on my ads, d) so my Google Adsense block on individual posts are seen.
A Famous Internet Entrepreneur… – This whole time I changed my tagline to “A Famous Entrepreneur in the Making”, I realized that I only meant for the internet. So, if you noticed, it’s now “A Famous Internet Entrepreneur in the Making”.
Slight Change in RSS E-mail Subscription Delivery - The only thing I really change is the subject line. It used to just say the blog title but now it’ll say the post title. I just did this to test out if it’ll help increase the views in my RSS Feed numbers.
Finally Upgraded to Wordpress 2.8.4 - Honestly, I should have done this before but I just postponed it for some reason. But if you haven’t already done so, I would suggest you upgrade ASAP. The reason is the fact that there’s a worm out there that’s hacking into blogs that haven’t upgraded yet or something on those lines. So, to protect yourself, I would just send a couple of minutes quickly upgrading.
Testing my Luck on Creating Wordpress Themes - Yes, you read right. I am going to try to create some custom Wordpress themes all by myself. I already have some of the design skills, I already know html and a little css so I figure I would take it to the next level and take on this project. Plus, if I can get the hang of it, I might just redesign my own theme!
Yesterday, I had to renew a couple of my domains for some of my other sites but while I was doing that, I saw a domain name lookup feature in which allowed me to sort domains that were recently expired. That triggered me to go on a mini spending spree of purchasing domain names.
There are a lot of different places to go to for domain registrations and GoDaddy was the main one I went to. Though, I’m not a big fan of all the extra fees they tack on, especially with the Whois privacy.
For those of you that aren’t fully sure on what that is, its basically a system in which keeps you anonymous on the domain purchase (or not). So, if someone were to look you up in a whois database, then your full name, address, phone number, e-mail address, etc wouldn’t appear. A lot of people like to stay anonymous for various reasons but working online, you should know some of the obvious things.
But rather it would just say the domain owner is private and they would supply some sort of default e-mail address to get in touch with you. Check out the screenshot below on the whois privacy for DatMoney.
To continue with our on going support of converting Wordpress to Blogger themes, we just added a new template in our Free Blogger Template Download section.
The theme that was converted is “Publicizer” which was originally designed by sitepronews.com for Wordpress. Of course, we don’t want people with Blogger blogs to feel left out so we converted it especially for you guys.
The “Publicizer” theme is a 3 column template which has web 2.0 colors and very easy to use. You can see the screenshot of the theme below. I actually considered using a similar theme when I first switched over to Wordpress but then again, if I had this when I was still at Blogger, I might not have switched over.
