Designing a logo and creating your own personal brand or look for your blog is exciting, but can be challenging for some. I consider myself artistically challenged, so I need all the help I can get. To gather ideas, consider creating a private Pinterest board and saving logos and color combinations you like. Once you have some ideas, you can work on your logo design and color scheme.
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Colors
A great free tool is Adobe Color Wheel. To use this tool, upload a photo which includes colors you like, and Adobe will create a color palette you can use for your designs.
Free Logo Design Sites
There are many free logo design sites available. If you do a search, many options come up. Here are some I found:
Canva Logo Maker
Incorporating Your Logo Into Your Site
Once I had my logo design, I saved it and uploaded it into my free Canva account. Then my logo was available to insert into other graphics. I also uploaded my logo to WordPress for use on blog pages and posts.
Adding a Banner, Customizing Your Look or Brand
No matter which theme you chose for your blog, there should be an area for customization. In WordPress, the Appearance option in the left menu bar is where you can change your banner and customize the look of your pages. Click around on the Customize menu to see your many choices. A white background is the most widely-used, for readability purposes.
Using Widgets
Using widgets is a great way to customize the look of your blog pages. If there is an item you want to appear on every page, you will want to use a widget. Widgets may be used for your subscriber form, a search bar, even your bio. You may customize widgets for your sidebar, your header and your footer. Design tip: Be sure to take the time to view your pages on a mobile device as well as a computer. Widgets which appear in sidebars on a computer view will be stacked on a mobile device view. You don’t want your blog visitors to have to scroll down too far before reaching your page content.
Installing Plugins
Plugins are an essential way to customize the look and functionality of your site. Too many plugins can slow down your site or even cause it to malfunction, so you want to choose your plugins carefully. As usual, it’s best to start with the free options.
- Jetpack is a free, all-purpose toolkit to help your blog run smoothly.
- Yoast SEO will help improve your website’s ranking and be found more easily by search engines.
- Akismet Anti-Spam prevents spam from reaching your comment box.
- WP Super Cache speeds up load time for your site.
- Google XML Sitemaps will create a sitemap to help search engines index your site.
- Smush Image Compression and Optimization will preserve your page load time by compressing images.
- WP Forms will help you create forms so your readers can easily contact you.
- Elementor Page Builder will help you easily design layouts for pages without needing to know coding.
- MonsterInsights will help you easily view your page’s web statistics using Google Analytics.
Whew! This was a lot of information. Take as much time as you need to work through it. When you’re ready, proceed to Step 5!