Recommended Hosting Providers for WordPress Blogs

All of the following hosting providers are well equipped to host WordPress blogs. They offer one-click installs of the WordPress software, which means if you have no experience in setting up a blog, all you’ll need to do is press a few buttons and the host will automatically install WordPress for you.

If you’ve been searching for a scrapbook WordPress theme for your blog, you’ll know that despite the 1000s of free themes out there, it’s really hard to find ones with a crafty design. Visual aesthetics are of course very important in craft, so it’s essential for your craft blog to be aesthetically appealing as well.

Dead Girl Media is a small design studio that I work for. Strange name, I know. ThemeGrrl is part of their blog network. DGM needed a new look for their website. Like the cobblers kids with no shoes, it’s fair to say the site has been a bit neglected as we focused instead on client and other work. The spirit at DGM is one of antithesis towards current design trends, not because we don’t like em, we just enjoy being annoying and different.

Looking for cool retro avatars? You’re in luck! ThemeGrrl has knocked up this sweet set of free avatars featuring 55 pulp, pop art retro images. To download, simply right click, select save as and you’re good to go!

Depending on your writing style, being online when you write can be both a help and a hindrance. It is useful to be online to research and find references for your piece, but it can also lead to what I call a net dependent approach to writing that devalues and removes the most important resource from your work; you.

Here’s a tip for a good quality blog: keep a journal, and keep it offline. Don’t let your blog become the record of every mundane and inane thought you have. They might be important to you, and good to work out of your system, but a blog might not necessarily be the best place for them. Not only will you bore your readers, you will deplete the value of your blog. Be humble. Understand that not every thought you have is of profound importance, relevance or interest to other people. There’s already a place for that, it’s called Twitter.

If you’re blogging about your journey, be it a health, travel, career, parenting, or some other kind of journey, for goodness sake, please blog about your journey! Sound like a dumb thing to say? If you’ve ever followed blogs that purport to be doing this, you’ll know that it’s not.

I’ve been thinking of doing this for a while. I have a bunch of websites scattered across three different web hosts and it’s high time I consolidate them into the one place. So yesterday I began the process of moving them all, quite a daunting task. I’ve moved about six Wordpress sites with few problems so far.

ThemeGrrl is next on the agenda. So there may be a little downtime or errors on the site here and there until it’s all set up on the new server. Email will be effected too, so if you need to contact me, best to hold off for a day or two. The new host is much faster so I can’t wait to set ThemeGrrl up on it’s new home. A new design is in the works too! I’m feeling bold and colorful…

Looking to improve your blog? ProBlogger is running another ‘31 Days to a Better Blog’ project! Held every two years, the project challenges bloggers to spend a month dedicating their time to improving their blog. Starting on April 1st, a post will appear on ProBlogger each day for 31 days teaching you how to build a better blog. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and receive the posts direct in your inbox.

Sign up to ‘31 Days to a Better Blog’ here

ThemeGrrl was featured on National Blog Review today!