If, like me, you are a blogger BUT you are not a coder or CSS expert, life can often be extremely frustrating.  However, thanks to a discovery I made last week, these frustrations are a thing of the past – That’s why I want to share what I have found with you.

Like most bloggers, I tend to blog at weekends and in the evenings, when things are quiet.  Sadly, this means that even though I have always paid for professional help, it’s seldom going to be there when I need it.  As a result, if I want to add new functionality to a blog or there’s a stylistic change I want to try that is not directly accessible via the theme, it can take 12, 24 or 72 hours for the changes to be made.

For bloggers on a budget that don’t have access to professional help and need to do this stuff themselves, it can take hours of ploughing through forums and searching Google to find answers and implement them.  This has always seemed wrong to me.

Thankfully, there’s now an answer – Headway

At last there’s a Wordpress theme, (which I’m using here) that allows me to create a blog that looks exactly how I want it to, with no help from anyone and without touching style sheets.  Moreover, I have been able to quickly configure the blog myself, to do everything I want it to.

It took me just minutes to get the initial draft of this blog configured; with my own header, fonts, colours, page styles etc.

After about an hour, everything was ready for me to actually launch the blog to the world!

You know what?  I’ve often spent longer searching online for how to make one small change to a blog, than it took me to configure this whole blog using the Headway theme.  I appreciate that the design here is obviously not going to be to everyone’s personal taste, but rest assured that what you see is exactly what I want it to look like.

Headway simplicity

I am not going to bore you with an insanely long list of what this theme can do, so here’s a tiny example of things that I was able to do in less than 60 seconds!

• With 2 clicks of a mouse, I can change where the top navigation menu sits; either above the header, below the header or turn it off and have it some place else completely.
• I can also add drop down menus to the navigation bar and drag the buttons into whatever order I want.
• In seconds, I can resize any content area, simply by dragging it across the screen with my mouse.
• The same is true of the sidebars.
• Plus, I can make sidebars look totally different on each page. For example:
  • Imagine you have a page on your blog, which sells your services. The sidebar for that page could be an animated list of testimonials.
• I can change the header image in seconds. No FTP access required and as with everything else in this list, no need to touch the CSS either.
• As far as I can see, I can change the colour of everything / anything in seconds.
• Simply by pointing and clicking, I can change the font, font size and font colour of text.
• I can also change the colour of hyper-links to anything, in just 2 clicks.
• I can set the blog to automatically send each new post to Twitter, as soon as it’s published.
• There’s stacks more things I could add here and I’ve only been using the theme a few days.

Summary

For the first time ever, I am in total control of my blog.  Equally, I now have a blog that looks exactly how I want it to, rather than someone else’s interpretation of what they think I want.  Of course, it also means that my blogging time can now be spent writing posts, rather than wasting valuable time looking for help online or trying to describe what I want to someone.

Full disclosure

Last week, after emailing the team behind Headway to thank them for transforming the way I blog, I became an affiliate of their theme.  This is the first affiliate I have ever promoted on any of my blogs - that’s a measure of how brilliant I believe Headway is!

If you want to take control of your blog and get great, professional results (without having to wait for or pay for professional help), I strongly recommend you take a good look at Headway.