There’s nothing worse than going to a blog/website and finding a ‘cluttered’ layout. Personally speaking, the whole point of a website is to engage your readers on your content, not over sized banners, flashy adverts and the most annoying of all animated gifs that is enough to blind any unexpecting reader.

I admit it, I have fallen for the curse of the animated blinkies, if you have followed me from the very beginning you probably would have noticed a dancing banana here and there and a ‘I’m a proud mom’ banner on my sidebar.

But over the years I have been learning design and psychological aspect of web design. What content goes with what, colour schemes, images, layout and most of all content. A personal blog, should be just that ‘Personal’, I don’t agree with sponsored posts on a blog that you use to share thoughts with like minded readers. Over the years a handful of companies have offered me to place a ‘sponsored ad’ on my blog for a fee, but I’ve always  refused. Apart from a couple which I thought was relevant to my content and my lifestyle.  This site is about ME, MY THOUGHTS, DILEMMAS and other things that I wish to share with my readers.

I don’t want to talk about funeral insurance, property investment or How to earn money from blogging in 5 easy steps.  Don’t get me wrong, if you are one of these people who are willing to earn a little bit of money through the [www], then it’s obviously a personal choice, but I would do it on a separate site, away from your personal blog.  But hey, that’s just me.

If you wish to start a blog and get your thoughts and ideas in the blogging world, my advice is to keep it simple and to the point. Start with a clean and uncluttered template. It’s also advisable to learn basic HTML, so that you can edit your blog to your taste. Here are some basic tips that I have learnt over the years on how to improve your blogging:-

• Try to keep your post between 400 to 1000 words.
• Highlight the important points. This way your reader can easily grasp the topic and have a better understanding of your post.
• Make sure that you link to any sites that you mention and also don’t forget to credit image sources on the bottom of your post.
• Write blog posts in advance, having 3 kids it’s not always easy to write a daily blog post. So when I get the time, I tend to write a few, maybe 2-3 and schedule it to publish at a certain date and time.This way, your blog is always up to date and will keep your readers coming back.
• Promote- use blogging promotion like Blog Catalog, Blog Explosion, Blog Linker and Network Blogs and Facebook Notes.

A few friends have asked me in the past on how to make a site/blog, and I’ve always told them to start with Blogger. Blogger is a blog publishing tool with an easy UI, you can customise templates as well as get a blogger.com domain name and most of all it’s FREE! If you don’t know anything about web development or just want an easy straight forward site then Blogger is a great platform to start your blog.

So being as nice as I am, I have compiled 10 Blogger Themes (that don’t suck) to get you started. Enjoy!

SHUSH – A minimalist and extremely flexible template with flexible multiple columns (2 or 5 columns). You can change the columns, all background and font colors, and font types without doing any coding.

FAR-AWAY – 2 column kids theme

PHOTOBLOG III -  photoblog webdesign is based on the Blogger page color theme

DESIGN PILE (PINK) – This theme comes in 3 color styles.You can use this blog theme for any kind of blogs such as personal blog,girly blogs,design blogs etc.

CRAFTWORK – 2 column Blogger theme

MORNING DRINK – a minimalist and extremely flexible template with flexible multiple columns (2 or 5 columns).

SUMMER – 2 Column summer coloured template

CRAZY MONSTERS – 2 column kids theme

CLEAR – Clear is the perfect theme for great authors. It is clean, clear and beautiful. It is minimalistic one-cloumn theme with the widgets all arranged at the bottom. Clear was designed to make your content stand out and make everything else get out of the way.

STARDUST – Dark colorful glowing beauty theme for blogger that is fully designed this blogger theme is perfectly suitable for personal,professional and any kind of blogs.