Entries Tagged 'Inspiration and Motivation' ↓

Creating a header for your blog is one of the best ways to make it unique and stand out from the crowd. When you’re trying to come up with an idea for your new header, you may be drawing a blank. I’ve got a few ideas that will help kickstart those creative gears in your head.

Just Text – I’ve seen a lot of great blog headers that are simply text. Using typography to make your blog stand out is gutsy but can result in a beautiful header. Find a snazzy font – there are tons of free fonts available on the web to download – and use your favorite image editing program to create a cool graphic with your blog title.

Add some text effects to make it anything but generic. You can even make it look like it’s 3D, shiny, or glowing. Try using different colors for certain letters, add a copy of the text flipped upside down to create a mirror effect, or create text using other images. There are lots of ways to get creative with text.

Photography – Some headers are nothing but a photo. A scenic landscape, a city skyline, or a row of cute babies smiling for the camera can make a memorable image for your blog readers.

If you want to get even more creative, design multiple headers and have them rotate each time the page is refreshed. This is a great idea for people with photoblogs who like to showcase their own work. My favorite place to get images for my blog headers is StockXpert.

Minimal – If you have a busy theme or you want to direct the focus on something in particular, you may want to choose a header that doesn’t attract a lot of attention.

A simple blog title may suffice, or a small logo. This works well for blogs that already have a brand that is recognizable.

Grunge – There are lots of grunge images and textures that you can download for free. Grab a few, splice them together, and create your own unique header with them.

While you’re looking for some grunge textures, find some grunge fonts to go with it. A dark grunge background with a white grungy text over top would look great on a personal blog.

Color – Using bright, vibrant colors for your header is extremely eye-catching. It could be something really abstract (in which case many examples can be found on free stock photography and images sites) or you can use a mixture of images that add a lot of color contrast.

In one blog header I designed, I took one image of an apple, duplicated it twice, and changed the color of the second two images resulting in a row of three colorful apples. It was simple and eye-catching at the same time and the same idea could be implemented for any niche blog using different images.

If you can’t decide on one idea, why not try more than one? Some blogs are known to change their headers regularly. In some cases this could confuse your readers, but if done properly, it could end up being something that makes your blog unique. Your readers will expect the change and look forward to seeing what you come up with next.

In my last post, I mentioned that creating your own header is one way to make your Wordpress blog unique to other themes.

Today I thought I’d take the opportunity to show you a few examples of some blog headers that really caught my eye. Hopefully they’ll provide a bit of inspiration for you.

1. The Mom Crowd

2. Blog Design Blog

3. Geeks Are Sexy

4. Friday Traffic Report

5. Karen Cheng’s Snippets of Life

6. Making It Lovely

7. Mark’s Daily Apple

This is actually the old header. He JUST launched a new design and I’m personally liking the old one better. Anyhoo, next.

8. Men With Pens

9. Mighty Girl

10. The Adventures of SuperWife

11. Define Me Clothing

They don’t have to be award-winning designs but it should tie in well to the rest of your theme.

More Wordpress goodness to come, so stay tuned!

I tweeted this today:

Quit obsessing about the skills you don’t have and focus on the ones you do have.

I’ve been giving myself a really hard time lately because I can’t do all the things I’d like to. I’m a great piano player – I used to teach it – but I suck butt at playing guitar even though I’d love to play better.

I love to mess around with code on my websites and there are certain aspects of it that I’m pretty good at, but I can’t design a whole website from scratch even though I’d like to.

I love to cook and bake, and making dishes with fresh ingredients is something that makes me really happy, but I couldn’t grow an herb garden if my life depended on it.

So what does this crap have to do with blogging or running a website?

Well, if you’ve been at it for any length of time, you’ll know that it requires an insane amount of work to be even a little bit successful. There are so many aspects to it that it’s impossible for one single person to do all of them well. (Yay for virtual assistants!)

I got to thinking today – which can be a dangerous thing – and wondered why I’m so worried about all the things I can’t do well and decided to focus more on the things that I do very well and will now spend more time doing them even better.

Worrying about the things we can’t do is a colossal waste of time.

If you can’t do something, you have a few options:

• You can hire someone else to do it, or trade services with them.
• Just don’t do it and leave it unfinished. I’m great at that.
• Learn how to do it.

Each solution poses its own problem.

1. Hiring someone can be expensive. Trading services with someone can take up a lot of time.
2. Leaving a task unfinished means loose ends that should be tied up. In a business, this could mean bad things.
3. Learning how to do it yourself can be extremely stressful and time consuming.

I bet you are expecting the perfect workaround at this point. Guess what. I don’t have one. I’m going to cop out and say that you have to choose which solution is the best for you. Ha!

I personally like to do a healthy balance of all three. I’ll get someone else to do the really difficult stuff that I just don’t have the skills/time for. I’ll leave the tasks that aren’t really important or beneficial to my blogs. I’ll figure out how to do the little things that I should probably know how to do anyway which usually saves me time, frustration, and money down the road.

The main thing here is not to have unreasonable expectations. Don’t assume you can do everything by yourself. Don’t feel bad that you can’t do something that others are naturally gifted at.

Instead, pinpoint your strengths and the things you’re great at and use that to your advantage.

As a single work at home mom with two insanely rambunctious kids, it’s difficult to wash a load of laundry let alone get any work done on the computer.

I’ve picked up a few things over the years that helps me balance work and family (and “me time”). I have to admit that I don’t always practice what I preach but I do my best and it really does work when you manage to stay focused.

JUST DO IT

How many times have you had a great idea only to let it die because you waited too long to put it into action? Having that great idea isn’t enough. Writing it down on paper isn’t enough. You need to start acting on it right away.

• If you want to start a new site, start by buying the domain name right away.
• If you want to write an ebook, sit down with a pen and paper and create an outline.
• If you want to create an email course, put up a subscribe form and get crackin’ on the first lesson.

Just do it! Once you start that first step, continue on and keep making steps, even if they’re baby steps.

Something John Reese said in his blog post How To Get Everything You Want in 24 Hours really struck a chord with me.

“You must do something every single day towards accomplishing your goal. It doesn’t matter how big or how small this effort has to be. It just has to be something.”

That is a great post to read if you have trouble taking action. I even printed that quote out and have it by my computer at all times. Every time I look at it I want to work!

END DISTRACTIONS

Who doesn’t love Twitter? Even though Twitter can be a great tool for building contacts, relationship and traffic, it can also be a huge time suck. Instant messaging, email, reading RSS feeds – all those things can consume a huge amount of time without you realizing it.

Sometimes I just have to turn all those things off if I want to get any work done. Other times, I allow myself a certain amount of time to use them. If you want to get really serious, you can time yourself to see just how much time you spend on things that aren’t benefiting your business. SlimTimer works perfectly for me. Scary how much time you lose to certain things each day!

ONE THING AT A TIME

I can’t tell you how many text files I have on my computer of articles/blog posts/ebooks I’ve started writing but didn’t finish. I’ve been in the process of cleaning them all up and I’ve achieved a lot in the past few weeks but I’ve implemented a few “rules” for myself to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand again.

I keep my computer desktop completely clean except for one folder, “To Do”. When I start a new project, I save it to my desktop. I will not allow myself to put it into my To Do folder until it’s complete. When it is complete, I rename the file to add “done” at the end. Then when I go to publish new content, I have all my “done” files in my To Do folder.

This works for me because I despise clutter and I can’t stand icons on my desktop. I’m a bit strange that way. I can’t stand anything on my counter tops either and fridge magnets are a huge no-no in my house. Poo on clutter, including half-finished text files all over my desktop.

Sometimes it’s hard to finish a project while you’re working on it because you come up with even more ideas while you’re in the process. This gets overwhelming and leads to complete burn-out so I’ve trained myself not to think about anything else while I’m working on something.

KEEP A SCHEDULE

Whether your kids are still at home with you or are going to school during the day, you need some kind of schedule or routine. My routine is always changing and needs to be very versatile. My kids are still young and most of my time is devoted to them so I might have a few months in a row where I get up early and work before they wake up, then I might have a few months where I work after they go to bed.

If you’re just flying by the seat of your pants, you should consider adding some kind of structure into your day. Starting a schedule for myself has added to my productivity immensely.

I’ve tried a lot of online tools like Google Calendar to keep a schedule, but I always come back to my handy dandy notebook. I love my daily planner and I would probably cry like a little girl if I lost it. A lot of WAHMs like to use Remember The Milk which can actually be used with Google Calendar so it’s worth checking out if you’re in need of a little routine-making action.

CONCLUSION

We’re all different. We all have different situations at home and we all have different goals and tasks that need to be accomplished every day.

It’s important to make the best of your time so that you can find a healthy balance for you and your family. Nobody said being a work at home mom was easy, but it can be very rewarding. The trick is to find what works for you.

Christmas has finally come and gone, and I would be lying if I didn’t say I was extremely glad it’s over! As much as I love spending time with my family, the holidays can be a really stressful time.

Something else that always happens to me over the holidays is I seem to lose my groove. My work groove that is.

Even though I have done quite a bit of work in the past few days behind the scenes, I haven’t done as much as I wanted to.

That’s why I’m glad I read this post at John Reese’s blog. He doesn’t update often, but when he does it’s always a worthy read. He always makes me stop and think which ends up alternating my train of thought indefinitely (and in a positive way I might add).

I’m horrible for putting things off until the last minute, or constantly telling myself “I’ll do it tomorrow”, but after this morning, I think things will be changing.

If you’re a big procrastinator like me, you’ll definitely want to read that post.

Something else you’ll want to do is have a clear idea in your head about your goals for 2009. In fact, you should write them down and keep them somewhere accessible – somewhere you’ll be looking at frequently. I plan on using one of my awesome multi-colored funky girly notebooks to store my 2009 goals in and I’ll be keeping it right beside my computer on my desk so that I never forget.

I’ll also be creating a plan to help me reach each of my goals along with a reasonable yet challenging timeline. I want 2009 to be my best year yet and I’ve been a busy little beaver acquiring all the tools and knowledge need to accomplish that. I would love for you to make 2009 your best year as well.

Let’s kick some recession ass!