I have been honoured to work with Elizabeth Shannon from ‘Sleepless No More‘ on getting her blog up and running.
This work entailed deciding on a look and feel, ensuring that the important aspects of ‘on page’ Search Optimization were addressed, allowing visitors to subscribe to the RSS feed easily and navigate the site. Visitors are also provided with the ability to subscribe to the Sleepless No More newsletter.
Social networking is an important part of Elizabeths marketing strategy, so including links to Twitter, Delicious and Facebook were important, as was the ability for visitors to be able to bookmark the posts to share with their friends.
I started with Bryan Gardners Revolution Code Blue Blog Theme… as pictured below:
I like this theme, because it is so clean and easy to read, and very professional in appearance.
Elizabeth already had a look and feel for her main site, which she wanted to carry over to her blog. Bernie Wiemers from Top ECovers took Elizabeths existing look and feel and converted that to a header, footer and background for her blog.
The result:
Elizabeth now has a customized blog, which maintains the clean look and feel of the original theme.
I also used a couple of plug-ins on the site to achieve the desired effects:
Tweet My Blog — a great plug-in that not only sends a Tweet when you make a new post. It can also display your twitter posts in your sidebar, and invites your readers to follow you.
Action PopUp — Visitors are presented with a Pop-Up on entry to the blog, that plays a very short video from Elizabeth inviting them to subscribe to her newsletter. This pop-up is excellent, as it can float on the page until dismissed by the visitor – and – once the visitor has subscribed… It won’t be shown again.
I’m really quite pleased with the way this blog presents…
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