Things to keep in mind when selecting a “Theme”

http://www.amway.ca/karenulmanis                                   Easily view products

For those of you who follow my blog you may notice I have changed themes, again.

I am really starting to see good traffic flow through to the site, I am now up to 79 followers! Thank you so much for following my blog, I am beyond grateful.

For those with a blog, like me you probably review your stats page. What I am noticing is though I am getting a lot of traffic to my posts, I am not getting a lot of people going to the other pages, and specifically the products page. This page is obviously important as I am trying to sell a product.

So I needed to find ways to show case the Amway products. I tried posting them to the blog as you would have noticed a few blogs ago, the gallery feature is pretty cool. However I don’t find it fits in the blog section. I feel it takes away from the content I am posting. By changing the theme, I was able to find a free one that positions the titles of my other pages in a more visible area.

I am already seeing results, far more repeat visitors today and they are clicking on the other pages. Perfect!

This actually was a little bit of work, here are a few mistakes I made, hopefully this will help you avoid them;

• Not all font sizes are created equal – The font size with this theme is much to small. It could just be my 45 year old eyes, but I needed to change it. I could have upgraded for 30$ and been able to customize it a bit but I still couldn’t get the font size I wanted. Luckily  you can google anything and find a solution. A little HTML added in text mode solved my problem. However I have to go back and add it to all my previous post. Bare with me, I won’t have it all done today. ( and just writing this post was more work then I want, so chose a theme with a font you can live with)

 

• Sidebars – be sure to really make changes in the preview mode. Not all side bars are the same and many have limited functionality and may not display the way you want them to. So be sure to test it out first. You can make changes to your blog in preview mode and easily exit out without making permanent changes.

 

• Widgets – be prepared to lose some of your widgets, some of them were still there but many were gone and I had to re add them. You may want to take note of the widgets you already have. It’s not the end of the world but took time setting them all back up.

 

• Advertising – Though I haven’t done this yet and can’t decide if I want to or not, you should look for themes that have 3 columns so you have room to advertise on the both sides of your page. You may also want to have a theme with room at the top for ads.
  

 

• Comments – I only noticed after I changed the theme and made my adjustments that it is not as easy to leave a comment with this theme. With the previous theme, the comment box was on the home page with each post. with this theme you will need to click on the post title, scroll to the bottom and leave your comment there. I am not sure how long I will be able to live with this option but we will see.

Hopefully this will be the last theme I have, well at least for a while. I actually think freshening up our blogs is a great idea. Maybe just not 3 themes in 1 month!

Have a great evening everyone! and again thank you for following.

Karen

 

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