They say that having quality content is the most important aspect to running a successful blog, but humans are visual animals and they want their information displayed in an aesthetically-pleasing manner. It’s hard to get through this first filter when your blog is all cluttered and looks like junk. No one is going to find your quality content if they find your blog to be absolutely hideous. At the same time, it’s also important to have a unique design so that you can distinguish yourself from the rest of the blogosphere.

Where, then, can you look for inspiration in terms of creating a unique blog design? Even if you are not able to code the custom theme yourself, you should be able to approach the person who will be designing and/or coding your blog template with some idea of what you want. Sure, you could randomly surf around the ‘net and see what sorts of websites you like on an aesthetic level, but why do that when someone else has already done that for you?

I came across a site called We Love WP and it is basically one massive WordPress blog design gallery. They’ve compiled some of the best looking WordPress-powered websites out there. I’m not saying that you should copy these designs, but they could point you in a certain direction and toward a certain type of theme. The individual sites are displayed as thumbnails and clicking through brings you to the full sites.

If you want to promote your own unique WordPress blog design, you can also submit your blog to We Love WP as well. It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved.

As you already know, a blog is not a podium speech. With the integrated comment system in WordPress, blogs become a conversation. After a post is published, the comment form is opened up for readers to provide feedback, ask questions, and otherwise interact with the original blogger. Having lots of active commentators on your blog is a great thing, because they add to the discussion and can help you get more traffic too.

Normally, when someone leaves a comment on a blog, their name works as the anchor text for the URL that they provide in the comment form. Because of this, many bloggers decide to enter their name as a keyword or keyword phrase rather than their actual name. This is somewhat dehumanizing, but the SEO and traffic side effects can be heavy motivators.

To help re-humanize the process while still providing the desired SEO effects, a special WordPress plug-in was developed. Called KeywordLuv, it allows commentators to separate their names from the link to their sites. This way, they can still have the desired anchor text, along with an actual name.

The way that the KeywordLuv works is that a commentator includes an “@” symbol between their name and their site name. For example, we could use “Gary Jones@Canada Web Hosting” in the name field to get it displayed as “Comment by Gary Jones from Canada Web Hosting“.

Get the KeywordLuv WordPress plug-in here.

Chances are that most people who visit your blog have not been there since the beginning. Even if they have been dedicated readers for a long while, they may not be as familiar with some of the gems that are hiding in your archives. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced with visitors who are finding your blog for the first time, whether it be through social media, search engines, or organic backlinks.

To help expose this audience to some of your older posts, it can be valuable to do some internal deeplinking within your current posts. Not too many people are going to take the time to sift through your archives, even if they have been organized with a clean interface, so you have to provide them with related posts on your own. Internal deeplinks can serve this purpose.

Another way to do it is to take advantage of the Related Posts WordPress plug-in. This inserts a list of related posts at the end of each article, based on the tags and keywords contained within the current post. For example, the post I did on Richmond Night Market gets served with other posts that I wrote on the night market. Presumably, these related posts add value to the reader experience.

Are you encouraging your readers to browse your archives? Are you getting full value out of every post you write, ensuring that these posts still receive traffic long after they have been published?

There are certain pages and functions that should be included on every blog, regardless of the niche and the nature of the website. There should be an About page that tells readers a little more about what the blog will address and hopefully the About page also provides some information about the writer(s) behind the blog. There should be a Contact page so that readers can get in touch with the blogger about any specific questions. Another very important page that should be included on every blog is an Archives page.

As you can imagine, there are many WordPress plug-ins out there that address this very matter. Yes, WordPress automatically generates pages for each month in the archive, but wouldn’t it be nice if you could have every post ever written on your blog on a single page? If you post a lot, however, this page can get incredibly long. The Clean Archives Reloaded plug-in cleans that up for you.

Instead of having links to every posts shown all the time, Clean Archives Reloaded creates a series of expandable menus for each month. Click on March 2008, for example, to reveal all the posts that were written in that month. You can expand and collapse multiple months too. For an example of how this plug-in looks like in action, check out the archives page on Viper007Bond.com, which happens to be the blog of the Clean Archives Reloaded author.

With the arrival of WordPress 2.5 came a whole new dashboard design. Some people liked the new look, whereas others have their reasons to complain. One of the most common issues that people have with the new dashboard design is with the layout of the Write Post page.

More specifically, the category selector has been shoved to the bottom half of the screen, forcing you to scroll down to select your category. Under the previous layout, the category selector was in the sidebar. It was easier to see and, thus, it was easier to remember to select a category. I know that with the new layout, I’ve forgotten to select a category on more than one occasion.

A plug-in was created to address this very problem. It’s called Category Selector Back to the Sidebar and it does exactly that. By installing and activating this plug-in, the category selector moves from underneath the writing area to the sidebar, sitting just underneath the “Save” and “Publish” buttons in your WordPress Write Post page. This is much more visible than the default placement.

The trade-off is that the “Related” section is effectively removed from the Write Post page. The Related section is where you could find links to manage all comments, manage all tags, view drafts, and so on. It’s a small price to pay, but it’s still a price to be paid for convenience. Whether this trade-off is worth it is a matter of personal preference.

It’s an unfortunate reality that there will always be people on the Internet who are looking to hack their way into websites and do all sorts of nasty things. While you may not be able to completely protect yourself against these malicious attacks, you can certainly take steps to protect your site to the best of your ability.

Instead of going line by line and trying to interpret areas where your blog may be vulnerable, wouldn’t it be nice if there was an automated solution that worked in much the same way as antivirus or anti-spyware software? That’s exactly what WordPress Scanner from BlogSecurity.net is meant to provide. The simple plug-in needs only be uploaded and activated, and then you can let it do its thing.

After it is done scanning for various security vulnerabilities on your WordPress blog, be sure to de-activate the plug-in. For more detailed installation instructions and other information, check out this page. The WordPress Scanner checks the WordPress version, looks for XSS vulnerabilities in the WordPress themes, and enumerates WordPress plug-ins.

The scan provided by this plug-in is just one more thing you can do to keep your blog safe from the bad guys. Be sure to close those back doors and open windows!