Beyond “Contact Me”: Engaging Your Readers with Forms

Bet you never knew there’s a whole world of creative possibilities hidden right in your blog’s contact form. Get ideas for new posts, go deeper than just “likes” and comments from your readers, and have some fun (really!), all with a few simple tweaks. Used in new and creative ways, forms can transcend their old function of primarily gathering contact info and open up a world of ideas for you.

The Ghosts in Your Dashboard

Your WordPress.com dashboard is the nerve center of your blog: it’s where your ideas come to life, and your creativity gives them shape. As writers, artists, and thinkers, we know inspiration can be sporadic and those moments of genius are fleeting — they come and go, which means that sometimes your literary flame burns out, and those bursts of creation are short-lived.

The result? An abandoned idea. The dreaded draft, sitting in limbo, staring back at you. And so, we’re curious: what’s lurking in the drafts section of your dashboard?

Your Statistics: More Than Just an Ego Boost

Or more than just an excuse to down a pint of Ben and Jerry’s and vow to give up blogging forever, as the case may be.

Most of us look at our stats more than we probably should; it’s natural to want to see whether anyone’s paying attention, and undeniably gratifying to watch the graphs go up, up, and away. But if you’re trying to build a readership and are not using the world of data lurking in your stats to inform your blog and boost your traffic, you’re missing out. Your stats page is way more than a bunch of charts with the power to boost or kill your confidence — it’s a bunch of charts that give you the ability to see into the minds of your readers and shape your blog accordingly.

Widgets 301

This week, we’ve talked about navigation on your blog — making it easy for your readers to find your content using custom menus, for example. We’ve already talked about widgets before, in “Widgets 101″ and “Widgets 201,” so let’s continue exploring how we can use them to direct your visitors to different places — and add some texture and color in your sidebar with little effort.

To follow along, head to Appearance >> Widgets in your own dashboard. This is where the magic happens — where we’ll enable widgets by dragging them from the Available Widgets area to the right, where we’d like them to appear on our blog.

Working With Custom Menus

A reader is visiting your site for the first time. Where do they go? What do they click on? Adding a custom menu to your site helps readers see how your site is organized and what you consider important.

Branding Your Blog: Let’s Get Visual 101

Way back in January we set the scene for talking about how visually branding your blog can set it apart from the pack. In today’s follow up we’ll look at one of the hands-on ways you can make that happen — by customizing your headers and sidebars.