Spend time on your blog content, not your theme.

Let someone else take the credit for your theme.

For the longest time, I wanted to create my own custom theme for my WordPress blogs. I spent hours working on the classic theme, trying to make it look like I wanted but for some odd reason, it never turned out how I expected.

All this time I spent working on my themes is time lost writing content. Instead of doing what I really enjoy, writing, I was playing with code. Even though I have been designing and maintaining websites since 1998, I just couldn’t come up with a design that I was happy with. Finally, after installing the automatic WordPress update plug-in, more about that later, I went to http://themes.wordpress.net/ and started browsing the hundreds of really nice theme designs. I finally picked a couple, for this blog and a couple of my other blogs.

Because I now have a design that I can live with, I can spend more time writing content instead of trying to inflate my web designers ego. I was so caught up in making an original design, I forget why I setup my blogs in the first place.

A nice theme is good but good content is better.

I ended up wasting nine months on this blog alone because I could not come up with what I felt was a good enough design when I should have just been working on my content, like this post here. If you are a blogger / web designer and cannot create a design that you really like, just pick one of the excellent themes scattered around the internet and start putting your time into your content instead of your design.