Little Blogging Tips Series: Ten Quick Tweaks

21 Jan 15

Little Blogging Tips Series: Ten Quick Tweaks

Hey lovelies, in this week's post I'm going to talk you through ten quick tweaks you can make to your blog. A lot of this I have said before (in previous posts) but there are new things and points I'd re-iterate it for you all again.

GET AN ENGAGEYA WIDGET

Engageya is personally my favourite 'You May Also Like' widget. This is a great widget as it fits just under your posts and suggests relevant ones that the reader should be interested in. Engageya is much more customisable than Linkwithin and adapts to the look of your blog more easily. You can choose from a variety of different display options including circles, squares and lists of text. Plus it's easy to install and create - you just have to follow the instructions on the website.

COMMENT FORM MESSAGE

This is one that people often don't know how to do, but it is really a nice little touch to your blog! Simply go to Settings > Post and Comments and at the the bottom you'll find the comment form message. What you write here will be what your readers see when they go to comment so leave a nice message for them!

GETTING RID OF THE TITLE FROM YOUR PROFILE IMAGE

One of the rather annoying things about when you create an image widget (on blogger) is that you have to include a title. If you want to avoid this simply upload your image on to Photobucket. Once you've done this you can copy the html code for the image and put this into an Html widget - and voila no title needed!

(copy the HTML code)

CHECK THAT ALL YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS ARE LISTED

This one is super important! Have a real look at your blog and make sure that all your social media links are listed in a visible way. This might seem obvious but I've visited so many blogs where I haven't found an email address anywhere. If you want people to get in touch with you or PR companies, make sure your email is displayed clearly somewhere or there's a link that goes to it. The same goes for Twitter, Instagram etc... You want to make it easy for people to get in contact with you, not a struggle! Go check your blog now and make sure all your contact details are easily accessible.

CREATING A CLICKABLE LINK

Being able to create clickable links is such a useful skill for blogging, in posts and when you comment on other people's blogs. When making a post you can simply use Blogger's Link button, but when commenting on blogs and wanting to leave a clickable link, use this html code:

Simply change 'Your Blog Url' to your web address, and your blog name (or whatever text you want the link to have).

GET SOME SOCIAL MEDIA ICONS

I personally love social media icons and think they are a perfect little touch to any blog and adding them is simpler than you might think. The first step is finding the social media icons you want to use and downloading them, make sure you save them as a png file. Pinterest is a great place to find free ones so have a good look and find ones you really love!

The next stage is uploading these icons to photobucket (or and image hosting site). Once you've done this a direct link will be created for those images which you will need to create your social media icons. Go to Layout, Add a Gadget and choose the HTML one. The Html for all your social media links goes in the content box.

For each icon you will need this code:

The highlighted bits are the ones you will need to change. In the first highlighted bit you will need to put the link of your social media page, however for email you will need to use a link like this instead: "mailto:example@gmail.com"

In the IMAGE LINK part you will need to put the direct link to your image from Photobucket and you may also need to adjust the height and widths of the image to the size you want (change the highlighted numbers).

Then simply add as many icons as you want, making sure that you change the image link and web address each time. It's a bit fidgety, but much easier than it sounds!

ADJUSTING YOUR PAGE LINKS (TABS)

This is one of my favourite tweaks you can do to your blog design - I was so happy when I learned how to do this!

First off let's centre your page links! You can do this really easily by simply going to Template > Customise > Advanced > Add CSS > Then add the following code:

.PageList {text-align:center!important;} .PageList li {float:none!important;display:inline !important;}

Another great tweak is getting rid of the border lines around your pages, this can be done by again going to Template > Customise > Advanced > Add Css > Then add this code:

.tabs-inner .widget li a, .tabs-inner .widget ul, .tabs-inner .section:first-child ul {border:none;}

Now your page menu is centred and there's no border!

TIME TO DE-CLUTTER!

I know what you might be thinking. Can taking away really make my blog look better, and the answer is yes it can! Take a good look at your blog, are there any unnecessary widgets that you don't need? Have you got a Disclaimer in your sidebar that can be moved to a page of its own? Less is really more as you want your posts to shine on your blog, not your readers to be distracted by lots of clutter in the sidebar.

Another good thing to think about is how many posts you have on your home page, if you have more than five think about decreasing this number as it can be a bit of a nightmare for people visiting your blog as it can make your blog load really slowly!

Changing your blog's look in these little ways can really make a world of a difference. Go on, have a little spring clean!

GET RID OF CAPTCHA

People really hate captcha, and for some people, they won't even bother to comment on your blog if they find they have to do captcha as it just takes up time - and sometimes you can't even read what it says! You can keep captcha if you want as it does catch spam, but I really recommend getting rid of it! You can do this by going to Settings > Post and Comments > Show Word Verification > No. You can also choose to moderate your comments before they are posted, but this is really up to you. Personally I don't use captcha or moderate my comments and I haven't had any problems with spam yet!

CREATE A POST TEMPLATE

If you always put your social media links at the end of your posts or the same message you can actually add this to the template of your post, so it will appear every time you create a new one. You can simply do this by going to > Settings > Post and Comments > Post Template > and put what you want in this box. Personally I put the html clickable links to my youtube, bloglovin and twitter here, so they appear in every post and I don't have to worry about inserting them every time I make a post. You can also put an HTML for an image here, such as a signature to end your blog post.

Did you fid this helpful? Let me know in the comment section below!