www.affiliateconfession.com

Several days ago I wrote a guest post for John Chow about some basic things you can do to improve your blogging and earnings online. One of those things was to leave comments on other blogs. If you don’t think that works, you should probably talk to Tom Ross of Push Standards, because that’s exactly how Tom got my attention and more importantly, my business.

Tom left a comment on a post here at Affiliate Confession and as I do to many who leave comments, I visited his blog and was really impressed with what I saw. I had been semi-actively looking for a designer or company to give Affiliate Confession a custom look and the web sites Tom features in his online design portfolio caught my eye. Tom’s work is uncluttered, pleasing to the eye and being that I spent 7 years designing Yellow Pages advertising, his designs just made me want to hang out and study them for awhile. I love to look at nice work and think, ‘I wonder how he did that?’ or ‘Hmm, how many Photoshop layers did he use on that one?’

Since Tom is an independent “Young entrepreneur and web designer” as he states in his blog header, I thought I’d shoot him an email through his Hire Me page and see what we could work out. Now, if you’ve seen the prices that some of the larger design companies like Unique Blog Designs have been charging, you know getting a custom Wordpress theme is an expensive endeavor. But after sending a few emails back and forth to confirm what I wanted and the look I was trying to achieve, Tom’s rates were very affordable. I can’t give you an exact quote because there are specific things that you have to work out with Tom, or any designer. However, the level of complexity in a blog design has a lot to do with the price.

Not knowing what to expect when dealing with a designer completely online, I was very impressed with Tom’s professionalism, enthusiasm and patience. The whole process from my initial contact to finished project and getting the theme implemented, took about 20 days and Tom was incredibly helpful in working with me to get the design online and in working order. He researched problems, emailed me code a couple of times and patiently explained some issues to get things working just as I wanted.

When you are ready to get a custom design for your blog or want to put together a nice, clean looking web site, I highly recommend Tom at Push Standards. I know you will be pleased with his work.

Now, if you already have a cool looking web site that’s CSS based and not full of tables, Tom has another interesting project he’s recently completed. CssGalleryList.com promises to be a constantly updated list of sites that accept nicely designed CSS sites. I guess a problem with many of these gallery sites is that they come and go and Tom wants to help out designers and owners of custom designed sites by keeping his gallery list updated.

Tom has already compiled a list of nearly 50 galleries to submit your site to and links directly to their submission page for your convenience. It only takes about 30 minutes to submit to all of these sites if you don’t get stuck like I did, looking at cool designs. Some of these galleries have nice PR4 and PR5 rankings and would be a great asset to get an incoming link from. However, don’t think you can just submit a Blogger.com site, a standard Wordpress template site or just try to spam these galleries. They are looking for high quality, customed designed sites.

Many thanks goes out to Tom Ross for helping me brand Affiliate Confession and giving me the custom look I wanted. If you need a designer for your blog or web site please contact him and remember, keep commenting because you never know how it will turn out.

Alan

Affiliate Confession is changing. As I write this post there is a new custom design being created for the blog and as you can see to the left the designer I’ve hired is getting his hands wet and is hard at work. The BloggingPro theme worked good to get things up and running and bring in readers, but it’s time for this blog to take the next step.

There are thousands of free WordPress themes available on the net, but if you want to distinguish yourself from the crowd, you must get a unique and custom design. I found this out by scouring the web looking at probably a few thousand free templates and none of them seemed to appeal to me. There were several that looked pretty decent and I thought about trying to tweak a bit, but I know just enough CSS and php to keep from drowning and I’d probably end up destroying the template.

All the major blogs like Problogger, John Chow, Shoemoney, TechCrunch, CopyBlogger and others have custom themes. You know exactly where you are when you visit their blogs because they don’t look like anyone else’s blog, they look unique. That’s part of branding yourself as a blogger and being immediately recognizable to your visitors. Even for the visitors that bounce off your blog coming from the search engines or other sources, they may bounce 10 times before they stick, but when they do stick, they won’t confuse you for any of the other 5,000 blogs that have the same theme you do.

Getting a custom theme done is not cheap, but at some point in your blogging journey you may decide it is necessary.

It was necessary for Affiliate Confession several weeks ago.

Alan