Category Archives: Ask Blog Design Guy

Should you abandon TypePad for WordPress?

My blog is hosted on TypePad, but it seems like everyone is using WordPress these days. Should I switch to Wordpress? If so, how do I go about doing that without losing the design and content of my site?

Positively Present

It’s being reported that WordPress is now used by 14% of all websites on the internet. It is by far the most popular content management system on the web. There are thousands of plugins and premium themes available for it and millions of users to help you out if you hit a road block.

But is it right for you?

Giving Life and Color to Your Blog

I want to give some life and colour to my blog and make it a well designed blog. I do not know how to proceed. Please help me.

- Surendranath Menon, thejus.blogspot.com

The first thing I have to say is that, in my experience as a designer, the simplest and quickest way to give life and color to your blog is touse WordPress. Why? Simply because WordPress is a bigger platform than Blogger or any other competitor. There are more designers actively creating awesome themes for WordPress than for any other blogging system.

What’s the quickest way to set up a self-hosted WordPress installation?

I am trying to set up a WordPress self-hosted blog, and I’m having a little trouble.  I think I need a geek’s advice to help unjumble all the tech jargon.  I’m using Blogger right now, and it is slowly driving me insane, so I was wondering what is the quickest way to set up a self-host?

Stacey Hume

Congratulations on taking the initiative to switch away from Blogger! I’ve never found Blogger to be nearly as useful as WordPress and I think you’ll agree with me once you make the switch.

How to Stimulate Blog Growth When You Start to Stagnate

My site is growing and shrinking at the same time. Facebook likes has increased from a dozen to almost 150 in the last month, there are legitimate fans posting comments and lots of user interaction with the content — even sharing it (5–10 average FB shares per post, plus Stumble & Twitter). Yet, somehow, my daily visitors is dropping. I suspect it has something to do with not having a steady influx of new eyeballs on the content (I was lucky to write a few guest posts for fair sized sites early on), but I can only approach so many people to do guest posts every month, and I can only spend so much time finding related sites to interact with/reach out to. I know that growth takes time, but I do not like seeing any stat trend downward. Given that my content/site seems “proven” to retain readers, how would you recommend I proceed with my growth?

- Zane Claes, Life By Experimentation

Spice Up Your Archives with a Timeline

I’ve always loved the following Timeline Archive as shown here. The code is provided here.

I use Headway but have no idea how to implement it so my archive looks much better than the current standard ones I can use.

- Stuart Wooster, StuartWooster.com

In today’s post, we’re going to take a look at how you can spice up your archive page using the timeline style Stuart has shared with us in the links above. Video after the jump!