For those that aren’t artistic, but who are limited to what they can do for themselves, I suggest two things:

1) Watch other website/blog designs around the ‘net and start a bookmark collection of those that appeal to you…especially if they, in some way, reflect how you think your blog should look. Once you have a collection of them, go look at them again and see if you can identify some common elements that they all use. Maybe they all use similar types of fonts, or similar colors. Maybe they all have lots of space, or maybe they’re all compact in some way. You can then try to incorporate those elements on YOUR site and see if you like the look of it.

2) Have fun browsing istockphoto.com for images. Images generally cost only $1.50 for unlimited website usage, and they have MILLIONS. If you can find a good one or two that you just really love, that fit that image you want to portray, then that can be your starting point. Use colors from that image, and play around and see what you can come up with!

Website making tools? You know…the problem with being a graphic-arts-person/hand-coder is that I DON’T know what’s out there for people who don’t have my own personal set of skills. Or rather, there are plenty of products that I’ve heard of, but that’s definitely not enough to give anyone a recommendation. Add to that the fact that many of those products cost more than a stay-at-home-mom-designer like myself would charge, and I can’t justify suggesting that someone spend weeks of their time and $100 when I’d spend a day and $50 providing the same thing. Does that make sense?

Have fun designing and writing!

Personally, if I come across a blog with its most recent post as more than about four weeks old, I suspect it’s on the way to abandonment, if not already. I subscribe to 200+ blogs and go through literally thousands of stories a month, and I could probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve unsubscribed because posting was too frequent. (And I’ve never unsubscribed from a blog with high quality posts just because they posted more than once a month .)

On my other blog, I once surveyed my readers to see how often they expected the blogs they read to update. 77% said two-three or four-five times a week (slightly more said four-five than two-three). (Meanwhile, my work blog is high-volume: we usually have a minimum of five posts a day.)