Branding your blog

The look-and-feel of web sites need to match their intended purpose. Ones for a political party or a painter or a writer will likely have different designs.

Those for authors may also look very different from each other, though they usually have the same kinds of content. Most will have samples of your writing, for instance, with links to where the full version can be gotten.

But the overall look needs to reflect the brand you’re trying to establish. Steampunk sites may have sepia backgrounds with grey-scale photos and black-and-white drawings. Star-Wars-like sci-fi might be very colorful and contain swooping spaceships realistically rendered. A romance site might have couples and lots of pink or purple. Horror might have dark colors and figures with glowing eyes—or peaceful scenes which somehow exude menace.

If you’re a multi-threat author you might consider having a separate site for each genre or series. Or something I’m trying. A single site for me the author, with a menu item for each of several series. Click on one choice and the header image is pastoral. Click on a second and the header image includes a spaceship against a starry background. Click on a third and the header shows yet a third distinctive image. In effect I have several different sites with a single root, me, the author.

The host site you pick can help you customize your site to reflect your unique brand of writing. I chose WordPress because it has many varied “themes” you choose from, of which 155 are free (119 are not). One of the free themes was perfect for what I wanted for my site.

Have I left out anything? What has been your experience in creating an author’s web site?

The first post was pretty general. What about some specifics? How did YOU go about branding your authors’ blogs? I have some ideas, but I love to find other ways to do things.

Here’s what I did.

I studied the free hosting sites such as Blogger and so on. I couldn’t afford to lay out money at the beginning, and I wanted something easy to create and keep up. I finally picked WordPress. Their propaganda page has proved to be accurate.

One of the reasons was their library of templates, a feature Blogger has too. These are ready-made designs. You get a default template when you create a site, but you can change it and then customize it further. WP has the largest number, the majority free, and they are very varied. Several are for bloggers who want a newspaper or magazine format. Several are for those who want to showcase artwork such as paintings and photographs. And so on.

I selected one which could do the following. Notice the blog background: the space around the posts. Also the featured image atop the page. They are from public-domain images posted on NASA’s web site. I picked these because my site is for a prospective sci-fi space-opera series.


That’s about it. All this was easy to do, though there were some fiddly details I had to learn in some cases. There are probably more advanced features I could have used, but I’m a big fan of doing things simply if at all possible.

That was for WordPress. Blogger is the second most popular free hosting site. If you are experienced with it, does it have customization features you've used to make it uniquely yours?