Archive for January, 2011
For those of you who want to take your blog to the next level in 2011 (perhaps you’ve stepped up to the Post a Day or Post a Week challenge), we’ve got your back.
From now on, we’ll be offering tips on blogging best practices to help you produce high-quality content, boost your readership, and make the most of all the fabulous WordPress.com features.
Here’s a handful of resources to get you started:
Need an idea?
Check out The Daily Post for a daily dose of writing tips and encouragement, or browse the Freshly Pressed posts or tag pages for inspiration. You can also combat writer’s block by tackling a thought-provoking Plinky prompt.
Keep in mind that the some of the best blogs are focused on one main subject and often target a specific audience. If you feel like you’re losing your focus, think about the reason why you started blogging in the first place, and how you define blogging success. Still feeling lost? Give these brainstorming exercises a shot.
Think you don’t have time to post?
Sure you do — WordPress.com users publish about half a million new posts every day. If so many others can find time, you can, too!
If you’re in a pinch, keep it simple with QuickPress. If you’re on the go, use WordPress.com on your mobile phone or create a post by email. You can even phone in an audio post! Writing posts in advance and setting them to automatically publish in the future is also a great idea for times when you’re going to be busy.
Want more visitors?
As long as you’re enjoying your blog, you’re successful. But if you want to draw a larger audience and interact more with other bloggers, there are plenty of ways to do so. Here’s one suggestion to get you started.
Consider this: You probably search the web for information frequently, and you’re able to find what you need pretty quickly (most of the time), right? That’s because you don’t carefully peruse all the information on a given topic, you rapidly scan page titles and headlines for specific keywords and phrases. Even when you’re leisurely browsing the web with no specific destination in mind, you use page titles to quickly determine whether or not a link is worth clicking.
Your blog post titles show up in a variety of places on the web and in the WordPress.com community. So if you want to boost traffic to your site, take the time to write descriptive, captivating headlines for your posts. For example, a post titled “Summer Vacation 2010″ might be descriptive enough for you and your friends, but “Beaches, Bungee Jumping, and Backpacking: My Adventures in Costa Rica” has a much better chance of attracting new visitors.
Check out Are You Writing Rockin’ Blog Post Titles? for tips on how to write better headlines.
Make 2011 your best blogging year ever!
Remember that you’re a part of a huge community of people who are passionate about blogging. We hope you’ll utilize comments and likes to offer feedback, support, and encouragement to one another as you work toward your blogging goals for 2011.
For those of you who want to take your blog to the next level in 2011 (perhaps you’ve stepped up to the Post a Day or Post a Week challenge), we’ve got your back.
From now on, we’ll be offering tips on blogging best practices to help you produce high-quality content, boost your readership, and make the most of all the fabulous WordPress.com features.
Here’s a handful of resources to get you started:
Need an idea?
Check out The Daily Post for a daily dose of writing tips and encouragement, or browse the Freshly Pressed posts or tag pages for inspiration. You can also combat writer’s block by tackling a thought-provoking Plinky prompt.
Keep in mind that the some of the best blogs are focused on one main subject and often target a specific audience. If you feel like you’re losing your focus, think about the reason why you started blogging in the first place, and how you define blogging success. Still feeling lost? Give these brainstorming exercises a shot.
Think you don’t have time to post?
Sure you do — WordPress.com users publish about half a million new posts every day. If so many others can find time, you can, too!
If you’re in a pinch, keep it simple with QuickPress. If you’re on the go, use WordPress.com on your mobile phone or create a post by email. You can even phone in an audio post! Writing posts in advance and setting them to automatically publish in the future is also a great idea for times when you’re going to be busy.
Want more visitors?
As long as you’re enjoying your blog, you’re successful. But if you want to draw a larger audience and interact more with other bloggers, there are plenty of ways to do so. Here’s one suggestion to get you started.
Consider this: You probably search the web for information frequently, and you’re able to find what you need pretty quickly (most of the time), right? That’s because you don’t carefully peruse all the information on a given topic, you rapidly scan page titles and headlines for specific keywords and phrases. Even when you’re leisurely browsing the web with no specific destination in mind, you use page titles to quickly determine whether or not a link is worth clicking.
Your blog post titles show up in a variety of places on the web and in the WordPress.com community. So if you want to boost traffic to your site, take the time to write descriptive, captivating headlines for your posts. For example, a post titled “Summer Vacation 2010″ might be descriptive enough for you and your friends, but “Beaches, Bungee Jumping, and Backpacking: My Adventures in Costa Rica” has a much better chance of attracting new visitors.
Check out Are You Writing Rockin’ Blog Post Titles? for tips on how to write better headlines.
Make 2011 your best blogging year ever!
Remember that you’re a part of a huge community of people who are passionate about blogging. We hope you’ll utilize comments and likes to offer feedback, support, and encouragement to one another as you work toward your blogging goals for 2011.
I love winter and I bet you do too but if you’re like me you probably don’t like the cold very much. You might be wishing you could take a trip to a beach somewhere right about now. Well, if you can’t make it to the beach yourself how about taking your blog there? Today’s new theme, Beach, will let you do just that.
The Beach theme
Originally developed by Gibbo for Drupal Thailand, the Beach theme can bring the warmth of Thailand’s shores to your blog all year round. But the Beach theme isn’t only just sand, sun, and sea. It has 4 different post formats built-in for short Status and Aside posts, and special styles for Quote and Gallery posts. Beach even has a bonus vertical menu area in the header.
You can read more about the Beach theme’s great new features in the Theme Showcase or activate it on your WordPress.com blog right now. Beach will be available soon in the WordPress.org theme directory for self-hosted WordPress users.
Bonus: If it’s too hot where you are right now and you’d like to take your blog someplace cold, give the Iceburgg theme a shot! Pine trees, snowy hills, and cool colors might just be what your blog needs right now. 
I love winter and I bet you do too but if you’re like me you probably don’t like the cold very much. You might be wishing you could take a trip to a beach somewhere right about now. Well, if you can’t make it to the beach yourself how about taking your blog there? Today’s new theme, Beach, will let you do just that.
The Beach theme
Originally developed by Gibbo for Drupal Thailand, the Beach theme can bring the warmth of Thailand’s shores to your blog all year round. But the Beach theme isn’t only just sand, sun, and sea. It has 4 different post formats built-in for short Status and Aside posts, and special styles for Quote and Gallery posts. Beach even has a bonus vertical menu area in the header.
You can read more about the Beach theme’s great new features in the Theme Showcase or activate it on your WordPress.com blog right now. Beach will be available soon in the WordPress.org theme directory for self-hosted WordPress users.
Bonus: If it’s too hot where you are right now and you’d like to take your blog someplace cold, give the Iceburgg theme a shot! Pine trees, snowy hills, and cool colors might just be what your blog needs right now.
Learn WordPress.com is a step-by-step tutorial that includes lessons on how to start a blog, customize your site, and connect with other bloggers in the WordPress.com community. It’s a great resource for anyone who:
- Wants to create a blog but isn’t quite sure where to start
- Needs help choosing a blog topic
- Wants to better understand how blogging works
- Is interested in attracting more blog visitors
Sound like someone you know?
Now you can share the Learn WordPress.com guide via email, Facebook, and Twitter using the buttons at the bottom of each chapter:
You can also print out hard copies of each section by clicking the Print button:
But it’s a bit of a pain to go through each section, so we have a brand new feature that gives you all of the pages in one giant page, so you can print out the entire thing — today it’s about 66 pages.
Click here for a printer-friendly version of the entire Learn WordPress.com tutorial.
Congratulations to all of you who have utilized Learn WordPress.com to become blogging masters. We knew you could do it!
Learn WordPress.com is a step-by-step tutorial that includes lessons on how to start a blog, customize your site, and connect with other bloggers in the WordPress.com community. It’s a great resource for anyone who:
- Wants to create a blog but isn’t quite sure where to start
- Needs help choosing a blog topic
- Wants to better understand how blogging works
- Is interested in attracting more blog visitors
Sound like someone you know?
Now you can share the Learn WordPress.com guide via email, Facebook, and Twitter using the buttons at the bottom of each chapter:
You can also print out hard copies of each section by clicking the Print button:
But it’s a bit of a pain to go through each section, so we have a brand new feature that gives you all of the pages in one giant page, so you can print out the entire thing — today it’s about 66 pages.
Click here for a printer-friendly version of the entire Learn WordPress.com tutorial.
Congratulations to all of you who have utilized Learn WordPress.com to become blogging masters. We knew you could do it!
Are you the type of person who enjoys simple and uncluttered looks on a theme? Clean Home, our new addition, is a crisp and structured theme wielding a traditional two column layout with two widgets areas.
Example of Clean Home's look and feel.
But don’t let Clean Home’s simple looks deceive you since it hides some great functionality to help you personalize how your site looks. It also comes with four color schemes, including a “snowy” and a “sunny” look —so both northern and southern hemisphere people out there can rejoice.
Go discover more about Clean Home at our Theme Showcase!
Designed by Mid Mo Design Clean Home is now available for WordPress.com and, for self-hosted WordPress.org sites, from the WordPress.org Themes Directory.
Are you the type of person who enjoys simple and uncluttered looks on a theme? Clean Home, our new addition, is a crisp and structured theme wielding a traditional two column layout with two widgets areas.
Example of Clean Home's look and feel.
But don’t let Clean Home’s simple looks deceive you since it hides some great functionality to help you personalize how your site looks. It also comes with four color schemes, including a “snowy” and a “sunny” look —so both northern and southern hemisphere people out there can rejoice.
Go discover more about Clean Home at our Theme Showcase!
Designed by Mid Mo Design Clean Home is now available for WordPress.com and, for self-hosted WordPress.org sites, from the WordPress.org Themes Directory.
Last year we—the Theme Team—were quite busy, not only offering you 29 great new themes, but also improving the themes you already love and use on your WordPress.com sites. In case you haven’t looked closely at your theme in a while we’d like to point out several recent improvements.
Custom Menus
61 of our themes now support Custom Menus—we’ve enabled it for all themes that previously supported top-level navigation with pages.
For themes without top-level navigation support you can still create Custom Menus and add them as widgets to your sidebar. Read the Custom Menus support page to learn how to get the most out of this feature.
And More…
In addition to Custom Menus we also enabled Custom Background support for 72 themes, added Post Formats support to a few themes, and updated all themes to use the standard WordPress comment form. The comment form changes—though invisible to you—pave the way for cool new social features involving comments on WordPress.com sites.
Many themes also received small updates. For example, two options were added to one of the most popular themes on WordPress.com, MistyLook: single post navigation links and hide the search bar from the header (both are available via Appearance → Theme Options if you use MistyLook).
Help Us Improve
Several of you recently said that your theme is almost perfect and we are curious about the last missing piece. Help us improve themes on WordPress.com by answering our question over on the Themes forum: If you could change one thing about your theme, what would it be?
This year we will continue making improvements and launching more new themes—all to ensure you have a theme that fits you perfectly and that you are excited to show off.
Last year we—the Theme Team—were quite busy, not only offering you 29 great new themes, but also improving the themes you already love and use on your WordPress.com sites. In case you haven’t looked closely at your theme in a while we’d like to point out several recent improvements.
Custom Menus
61 of our themes now support Custom Menus—we’ve enabled it for all themes that previously supported top-level navigation with pages.
For themes without top-level navigation support you can still create Custom Menus and add them as widgets to your sidebar. Read the Custom Menus support page to learn how to get the most out of this feature.
And More…
In addition to Custom Menus we also enabled Custom Background support for 72 themes, added Post Formats support to a few themes, and updated all themes to use the standard WordPress comment form. The comment form changes—though invisible to you—pave the way for cool new social features involving comments on WordPress.com sites.
Many themes also received small updates. For example, two options were added to one of the most popular themes on WordPress.com, MistyLook: single post navigation links and hide the search bar from the header (both are available via Appearance → Theme Options if you use MistyLook).
Help Us Improve
Several of you recently said that your theme is almost perfect and we are curious about the last missing piece. Help us improve themes on WordPress.com by answering our question over on the Themes forum: If you could change one thing about your theme, what would it be?
This year we will continue making improvements and launching more new themes—all to ensure you have a theme that fits you perfectly and that you are excited to show off.