Choosing a WordPress theme is a very important step to running a successful WordPress blog. Presentation is always a factor in how successful a website runs; do you think Yahoo or MSN would be popular with an amateur looking presentation? The answer to that question is no. These websites all had a design that made it great for people to enjoy, making them wanting to come back.

So when you are picking a new theme, you want to make sure it matches your site. What do I mean by this? This means that you want to make sure the content and your theme match; if you are writing about how bad life is I am sure you would not want a fluffy cloud theme would you? So how can you decide if a theme will match with your content?

Well that is really simple, if you take the time to download the theme, and upload it to your site, you can see what it looks like without even activating it. All you need to do is click on one of your available themes and it will show you exactly what your WordPress blog will look like with that theme.

So the next time you are picking a theme and you are not quite sure, why not just take the extra minute to download the theme and see what it will look like with your content. This can help you decide between a great theme for your blog and an theme that is just “OK”.

A lot of people who run personal blogs have some kind of contact form their visitors can use to get in touch. This is a growing trend on corporate blogs as well. The purpose is to make it easy for people to offer you customer feedback and comments without having to bother using their email clients. It also cuts down on spam by not making your email address available to the public.

The problem with a simple contact form is that they do not promote customer relationship management very easily. It’s essentially just a one way conversation without any real means of getting a sense of what your site or blog’s community really wants. There’s where tools like SuggestionBox come into play.

With SuggestionBox, you can quickly and easily setup a means for customer relationship marketing needs. Your customers and visitors can quickly offer you feedback on your site or product using the site’s simple interface. The best part is that SuggestionBox handles all of this without you having to install or configure any software.

If you’re looking for a better way to interact with your customers on your site or blog, and you aren’t happy with a simple contact form, you should give SuggestionBox a look.

It’s pretty obvious that I’m in favor of using WordPress to create a website. It’s slowly turning into a viable content management solution for sites of all shapes and sizes: blogs (of course), static content sites, brochures, interactive social sites, and more. Unfortunately, there’s still quite a hill to climb for less technically inclined folks looking for an easy solution to build their own site.

The secret on how to build a website when you have no technical knowledge to speak of is to find a quality website builder, like the one available from BuildYourSite.com, that offers an affordable site building program at a low price.

In less than ten minutes, a new user to BuildYourSite can have their very own website up and running without any technical knowledge whatsoever. This is in stark contrast to WordPress where the concept of databases, installation and themes has to be understood before you can really get going with the program. The increasing rise of one-click installs of WordPress on web hosts may one day eliminate this hurdle.

BuildYourSite comes with over 4,000 easy to install and customize templates for your website. They’ll even register a domain name for you at no cost. All of this for under $10 a month seems more than reasonable. Check it out if you’re looking for a simple website builder.

The current version of WordPress is 2.6 (which is great), so what can we expect from wordpress 2.7? There are some features that they are considering and I just want to share with you which ones look like they could be the most useful.

Keyboard Shortcuts for Comment Moderation
This can be a great a WordPress addition because there are a lot of people out there, like myself, who love to use hot keys. If I can moderate my comments with just a few buttons on my keyboard I could fly threw them and give myself more time to write content for my blog.

Site Maps by Default
This would be awesome! This is not a big deal if we do not have it because there is a great plugin that controls the site map for us. But it would just be better if we can have a site map without installing a plugin. I know that there are some people out there who run a lot of blogs that may like this change.

Remove Old/Unused Code
This would be an update that very few people notice. There is some code in the WordPress software that is from when WordPress first started out that is no longer in use. Removing this legacy code could speed up your site and make it load faster. Not by much, but it will still help for people that have a slow connection.

So these are just a few of the updates that may be in WordPress 2.7. There is a bigger list, but out of them I think these 3 would be most useful.