Odd Dad Out

This post is part of a guest blogging series I’m doing over at The Odd Dad Out and was originally published on November 10, 2010.

Over the first two parts of this series we’ve talked about a wide range of things that hopefully have helped with any questions you may have had. In today’s third part I’ve got a few final thoughts about some things I do with the sites that I manage.

Build a lab

One of my favorite things to do is create a “lab” for myself with each site I build. All I do is install another copy of WordPress to a “/lab” subdirectory of the domain through my host. This gives me the ability to try new things, test out code and work on design changes without affecting my production blog.

If I had a dollar for every time I crashed my site editing the custom function php file in Thesis I could probably get out from under the albatross of a house in which we live.

Building your own lab may sound unnecessary, but when you grow bored with the design of your site as often as I do it makes some sense. It has been a great way to learn without doing any permanent damage.

You can export your content to an XML file and import it into your “lab” environment to help you figure everything out. If you do this, however, you should also set your privacy settings under “Setting” to exclude this blog from being found by the search engines. It wouldn’t be much fun if Google knocked you for duplicate content just because you built yourself a digital sandbox.

Get engaged

This post series could go on for weeks if I started talking about the different services and plugins I use, so I’m going to cut it down to just one.

Social networking is all about the conversation and my favorite add on to my sites is Disqus. You may have had, or may know someone that had, a bad experience with Disqus, but it has always worked just fine for me on my sites. The only time I’ve integrated it into a Blogger blog the process wasn’t terribly smooth, but it did work.

What I like about Disqus is that with a little extra effort at set up your blog guests can choose to login using a number of social networking sites, or not at all. I also like the moderation panel and the way it looks on the site as compared with the basic threaded commenting system that is the default with WordPress.

They have recently improved their mobile site design to make it easier for people using smartphones and other devices leave comments on blogs that use Disqus. And, lastly, they will soon be releasing iPhone and Android apps to give moderators better on the go control.

If there any follow up topics (especially those pertaining to WordPress, plugins or premium themes) that you’d like me to cover, drop us a comment and I’ll write about them in a future article.

This post is part of a guest blogging series I’m doing over at The Odd Dad Out and was originally published on November 3, 2010.

Last week I started a series about how you can help step up your blogs game. For the first installment the information was very basic. Today we’ll be digging a little deeper to help give you some more ideas on how you can get your blog where you’d like it to be.

Learn a little HTML

I know enough HTML, CSS and PHP to be dangerous. There are a number of great online tutorials to help you brush up on coding, which I find can be quite relaxing. One of the sites I like is W3 Schools who has step-by-step instructions for HTML, HTML5 and CSS, among others. However, I can’t always find exactly what I’m looking for in these tutorials, so I turn to Google and there are hosts of blogs that are great resources to help you customize your particular platform.

Premium themes

All of the sites I’ve ever developed use WordPress, so that is the platform I can speak to the best. The first iteration of Real Men Drive Minivans was a free theme, but after nearly a year of looking at the same old thing I decided to make the investment in a premium theme.

From many of the things I had read on the Internet, I chose to go with Thesis and ultimately grabbed the developer’s license, which set me back a total of $164. It was pricey, but it was worth it and gave me the ability to resell the theme framework to clients, which I provided at cost as a value added to my services.

The third iteration of my site was when I added a third party skin to the Thesis theme to give it a semi custom look. The skin cost me $50 and since it was designed to work seamlessly with Thesis installation and customization were very easy.

The fourth and latest iteration of my blog that I recently completed is based on the Genesis framework from StudioPress. The old blog needed a fresh coat of paint and while I liked the concept of what the Thesis skin brought to the site it isn’t as clean as I would like it to be.

I wasn’t planning to make a change, but I had the opportunity to grab a license for Genesis for a client I was working with and it was like a shiny new toy I had to play with. It wasn’t cheap. I shelled out $250 for their Pro Plus package, but for as many sites as I manage it was worth it.

So why am I telling you all of this? Because in my view the premium themes have added a lot to the look and feel of my site, my knowledge of how things work (Thesis forced me to learn some CSS and PHP) and gave me a greater ability to customize my site myself.

No sites I’ve ever built are going to win any design awards, but I like to think they are clean and functional.

Graphics & open source icons

I’m not a graphics designer, so any custom design was out of the question due to lack of ability and cost of hiring someone else. Since I harbor no intentions of using my blog as business platform the prospects of dropping a grand or so on a custom design was out of the question.

Still, I really wanted a nice logo that I could be proud to display on my site. I did a lot of research into cost, however, when a friend referred me to crowdSPRING I knew I was onto something. crowdSPRING is a crowd sourced design community where you hold design contests and graphics designers present their ideas based on your requirements. For $250 I was able to procure a logo and a header file for the blog that I absolutely love.

Just about every other graphic or icon on my site was procured using open source items that are available on the net. If you are looking to add or mix up your social networking icons you can try out Icon Finder or Google “social media icons” for a plethora of posts with free image packages.

All told creating a blog similar to what I have will run you less than $500 upfront (hosting, premium theme & graphics package) and $85 per year thereafter, assuming you do the rest of the work yourself.