If you are a dummy or beginner blogger, you don’t need to pay so much money for a custom blog design like mine. You may buy a good quality premium theme, and make some changes on it so that it looks unique.

Do you remember my old post Say Hello To Premium WordPress Themes? They extended the 4 for 1 special until 31 December. If you are looking for a premium WordPress theme, you can get 4 premium themes for $70 from the WooThemes. If you can not afford $70, you may try one of their free themes. They are all very good quality and fancy looking.

You should ask your blogging buddies to collect the $70. 4 bloggers are enough. Each blogger will pay only $17.5. Then you will share the themes.

Good deal, right? One 4 All, and All 4 One!

Right after your designer delivered your fancy looking new custom blog design, you expected a surge in your blog’s traffic, but nothing happened? Even if you have the best blog design ever, you need to promote it effectively to increase incoming traffic. The easiest way to promote a new custom blog design is to send it to CSS Galleries. They will bring good traffic and one-way backlinks to your blog.

What Is A CSS Gallery?

Before talking about a CSS gallery, do you know what is CSS? CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. It is the  standard way of styling blogs and websites. If you use WordPress, you already know that every theme you use  have a style sheet built into CSS. It basically controls the look of your blog – the fonts,  the colors, spacing, layout, and more. It is the backbone of your blog design.

A CSS Gallery or a CSS directory is a website which showcases websites with good design. If your blog gets featured on these galleries, it will certainly bring good traffic. The most popular CSS galleries have PR4-PR5 Google PageRank. So it is also a very good way of having one-way backlinks to your blog.

You need to have a unique blog design so that your submissions to the CSS galleries will be accepted. You have no chance at all with a popular blog theme which thousands of bloggers are already using. The main purpose is to give the designers as many blog/website design options as possible to inspire from.

CSS Galleries List

Thanks to Caroline Middlebrook, she prepared a very good list in her post 101 CSS Galleries for Backlinks and Traffic. I suggest you to check the CSS galleries in that post, and start submitting your new custom blog design. I have already submitted, and my blog have been showcased on some of them. See my blog at CSS Creme (Don’t forget to vote!)

Don’t submit all the CSS galleries at one go. Google robots won’t like it at all. Also the galleries don’t accept all submissions. Try to pursue the ones with PageRank 5. If you notice my blog while surfing the galleries, do not forget to vote for me.

Having a custom blog design is a dream for many bloggers. You have to pay prices ranging from $300 to $3000 to have a good custom blog design. You need to verify whether your custom blog design meets some basic requirements before paying the full amount. I prepared a checklist for your easy guidance. Go over this checklist and don’t let your designer fool you.

1. RSS Button: Does your blog have a big RSS button which can easily attract your visitor’s attention? Tell your designer to place a big RSS button above the fold.
2. Widget Functionality: Check whether your new custom blog theme’s widgets are fully functional. Most probably you will face with a problem with widgets. Ask your designer to fix them.
3. Logo & Branding: Negotiate with your designer and try to get a custom logo design at the same time that is compatible with your custom blog design. First impression counts. A custom blog design with a good logo will rock!
4. Favicon: Tell your designer to create a favicon icon for your blog. Have you seen my favicon? It always appears before my blog’s URL on your browser’s address bar. It is a small version of my blog’s logo. You need to have a favicon for better branding.
5. h1 Tags: Ask your designer to wrap your blog titles with h1 html tags. This is good for the sake of SEO. Check this for more details on SEO for blog posts:The 5 Basic Steps Of SEO For Your Blog – Part 2
6. WordPress compatibility: Verify that your custom blog design is compatible with the latest version of WordPress. It is not an issue for quality designers, but chances are you may face with a problem.
7. Plugins: Make sure that your existing plugins are compatible with your new blog design. If you face with a problem, let your designer know immediately.
8. Search function: Verify that your readers can easily find a keyword or term easily with your search button. You don’t have any search button in your new blog design? Tell it to your designer immediately.
9. Advertising space: Ask your designer to create a space for sponsors.
10. Archive: Make sure your designer collects all your previous posts under an archive. If not, tell him to do.
11. Tag Cloud: Tell your designer a fancy looking tag cloud for your blog. This is good in terms of SEO and improving readership.
12. Add My Feed To: Look at my blog’s “Add my Feed To” section. Give a few options to your readers so that they can add your blog to Technorati, Google Reader, BlogLines, or Yahoo. This is a piece of cake for your designer. Don’t miss this one, it is quite useful.
13. Browser Compatibility: Make sure your blog looks good on both Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari. If not, inform your designer immediately before the payment.
14. Check your blog’s loading time: If you have a fancy looking blog which is loaded in a minute on many browsers, chances are you will break a bounce rate record! Keep your blog simple, and check the loading speed on browsers. If you are not satisfied, tell your designer. Keep it simple, simplicity is the best!
15. Get Your Readers Comments: Ask your loyal readers about your new blog design. They will be telling you a lot of problems which you may not notice.

Let’s assume you verified all the items mentioned above, what is next? You need to promote your new custom blog design to get the maximum benefit from it. I will tell you about how to promote your new custom blog design soon. Stay tuned and make sure you are subscribed to Search For Blogging RSS feeds so that you don’t miss any updates.

Yesterday I thought about the things I accomplished during my blog’s first year:

• 250 posts are delivered. If we assume 3 hours spent in average per post, it makes 750 hours for one year. In other words, 31 days spent only for writing posts and promoting them! What a dedication!
• I finished Blog Mastermind Blog Mentoring program by Yaro Starak
• I invented the term Bloghology.Similar to an anthology, Bloghology was a collection of bloggers, their profiles, photos, and links to their best posts. It was a PDF e-book which can be easily circulated throughout the blogosphere for personal branding and marketing of start-up bloggers. It was evolved and became a magazine when I met Vasilis Pasparas, the owner of IGM Interactive. Have you joined our contest by the way? Spread the Word Bloghology, Win an iPhone 3G!
• My blog’s Alexa hit 69,168. RSS readers are almost 300, and up!
• In average 400$ per month was generated through my blog which encouraged me to leave my full time job by the end of July 2008.
• I signed a contract with a media company in USA to let them use my RSS feeds for the magazine they are building for mobile phone users mainly in USA. I will tell you more about this as soon as I get the media kit from them.

All in all, it was a very fruitful year for me. Next year will be a lot better than this year. This new blog design will help me get more attention, thanks to Sahil Lavingia!

How do you find my new custom blog design? I am looking forward to hear your thoughts and suggestions.

Nowadays I dream about having a custom design blog for my blog. My theme has done great so far. Yet I guess I need to have a custom blog design for further growth. That is why I have been looking for a good designer online. While looking around, I noticed that bloggers are not limited to freelance blog designers. Thanks to PSD2HTML.com service, you can convert PSD to HTML in 8 hours!

About PSD2HTML

PSD2HTML.com is the first online conversion service launched in the beginning of 2005. How do I know this ? I found their press release announcement in PR News website back in 2005. Read PSD2HTML.com: Convert Graphics into HTML with Lightning Speed

They provide fast and quality conversion of graphic Web design into Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and its extensions. They accept source files in all common formats, including PSD, PNG, AI, and even HTML (existing markup). They support the following markup specifications:

• W3C Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict
• W3C Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• W3C Valid HTML 4.01

What Is In It For You?

Imagine you design websites as a freelancer. You finished your customers desired layout in Photoshop, yet you have too little time left to spend on coding. Your customer expects the final delivery in two days, and you get stuck! In this case PSD2HTML.com, with less than 8 hours delivery, can indeed create miracles for you. Okay you will pay some money, but as you will be spending less time on coding, you will design more websites during the same period.

You may be a good Photoshop user, yet have no idea about coding part. In this case you can have your site up and running in 8 hours after you finished the layout. Sounds really good indeed.

How about the Prices?

They have quick turnaround. The prices starts as low as $153. When compared to a custom blog design of $400-$500, obviously it is a cheaper, yet still very good solution to your custom blog design needs.

Their Comprehensive Order Now Page contains markup packages and a full set of all necessary markup options with descriptions. Their support team helps to choose all necessary options for each project if required. Different implementation types are also available.

Testimonials & Reviews

To be on the safe side, I made an online search and found out below reviews about PSD2HTML.com:

• Review | PSD to HTML by PSD2HTML.com
• Review of PSD2HTML
• Review: Professional grade xhtml coding service on demand with PSD2HTML
• PSD2HTML Review

Conclusion

What PSD2HTML.com offers is a good alternative to custom blog designers. They have recently launched a number of options to implement your design as WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal, Joomla!, Pligg, Blogger, Shopify, X-Cart, CMS Made Simple, and CubeCart. If you are looking for a custom blog design, you can try this service.