The Writer’s Blog Workshop Series: How to Design Your Blog, Part 3
The Writer’s Blog Workshop Series Lessons: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7
Lesson Seven:
Your website/blog is your face to the world. It should be professional. If you choose to install your own blog platform and design, we have articles here to help you. But if you aren’t technically or artistically inclined, there’s no need to despair. There are many qualified and reasonably priced designers who can work with you to create the blog of your dreams. Register a domain name and start looking for the right designer for you.
Tips to consider in choosing a designer:
1. Visit numerous websites and blogs. Make a list with urls of the ones you like. Scroll down to the bottom of any page (or sometimes it can be found only on the main page or on a separate contact page) to find out who designs, hosts, and maintains the site. If you like the site, that may be the designer for you.
2. Make a budget. Some designers are extremely expensive, charging thousands to build a custom website/blog. Others are more reasonably priced, in the neighborhood of hundreds. Usually, the contact page, as noted in Tip #1, will not only list the designer’s name but also provide a link to their site, which in most cases will provide prices. Determine a budget, and stick to it. Remember to include not only initial design but hosting and maintenance expenses in your planning.
3. Get recommendations. If you’re interested in a designer, ask people about them. It’s especially helpful if you know someone who uses that designer, but don’t be afraid to ask relative strangers, either. If you don’t know anyone who uses a particular designer, post to a message board or other forum and ask if anyone has anything good/bad to say about the designer. Google the designer and company as well.
4. Talk to the designer. Don’t hire a designer without discussing your needs, your budget, timelines, etc. Find out if you feel comfortable with the designer and whether communication between the two of you is effective.
5. Be prepared. Don’t expect your designer to read your mind. Use what you learned in this workshop series to develop a plan for all aspects of your design, and be specific in relaying that plan to your designer. Have the plan prepared before you start contacting designers.
Plan and prepare, and blog on!
The Writer’s Blog Workshop Series Lessons: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7
If you would like to learn more about creating, maintaining, and promoting your author website along with the creative spirit it represents, please subscribe to our
full RSS feed.
Another great lesson!
Sorry if this is a dumb question…When you work with a designer…how much control do you have over changes to your sidebars? Do you have the designer put in all your widgets, or can you add/subtract them as you need to?
Hi, Amy! You can have as much control of your sidebars as you want to have! For me, while I do have my designer set up my sidebars and do various things in them sometimes, I do all of the regular maintenance and editing in my sidebars. I access them through my WP admin panel.
Suzanne: Just to make sure I understand: You had the designer put in all the plug-ins and widgets like your weather widget and your currently reading widget and stuff? Or did you add those later and just have the designer design the protocol for the sidebars when stuff was added? Can you give an example of how you update/control the content in the sidebars as far as adding specialized widgets, titles, etc. Or is that all done through Wordpress and I’m just being a dummy?
I’m trying to figure out how much to have the designer do and how much I can do myself. I’m guessing the more I do myself, the less the designer will charge, but I don’t want to mess up the site.
Thanks.
Amy, I had the designer do EVERYTHING originally. Once everything was in place, moving things around to suit myself when I wanted to change things up was easy–all I do is copy and paste. And when I wanted to add more headers and have more sections (like for more recipes, or the old barn, etc) to get more headers I would just copy her coding from a previous header she’d made and change the text to read what I wanted the new header to say. Since I didn’t have time (or the desire) to learn how to do all that myself, having her put everything in place made it easy for me to then go in later and change things, move things, add things, simply by copy and pasting widget codes around, copying her coding that makes headers and centering, etc. I hardly ever have to pay her to work in my sidebar now because almost everything I want to do, I can do with copying what’s in there to add or move things around. This is where a professional can really save you a lot of time and frustration by getting things in place to begin with–then you can adjust on your own later.
Thanks, Suzanne!
I had another question on this: what is the usual turn around time between submitting all your materials to a designer and actually getting a quote/time estimate?
Amy, that varies, of course. Some designers can be backed up for months. They should be able to tell you right away what their timeframe is for doing a new design so you can decide whether you want to wait or find another designer. Once the designer is ready to start on your project and has gone over all your specs and details with you, they should be able to get back to you with a mock-up of the design within a few weeks.