Today’s award goes to another blogger that has overcome serious technical difficulties to get her blog on the road. I know, because I was one of those that was trying to help her solve them in the private forum for Alex Jeffreys students !

I’m still not quite sure what was going wrong with the malfunctioning theme that was her first choice, but when nobody seemed to be able to sort it out, she chose to look for another. It’s only in the last couple of days that I thought I ought to check back and see what was happening there.

And what a pleasant surprise ! The theme that she’s chosen is a bit different from most of those that I’ve seen during this competition because it extends right across the screen, rather than having a border. But I think it works well because the central part is filled with some good content. I particularly like the use of images throughout each post.

This is another of those little touches which adds something to blog posts that can lift them out of the ordinary. It’s certainly something that I need to pay attention to in my own posts.

What encourages me is the fact that just like previous winner Shirley Cheung before her, today’s winner has just not let go ! And whether it’s a recalcitrant blog like hers or some other difficulty, we should remember the words of Vince Lombardi:

“It’s not whether you get knocked down,
it’s whether you get up.”

So for getting up and (to mix sporting metaphors) hitting the ball out of the park, today’s Blog Of The Day Award goes to Heidi Passey for heidipassey.com.

Congratulations Heidi, your Blog Of The Day Award badge is on its way !

But I always knew that sooner or later, I would have to spend some time looking in to changing it. Mainly because I would probably want to add widgets and the like in strategic places. With the launch of my “PPP”, I wanted to add a form to the blog, but I didn’t want to force too much of the contents of the one side-bar “below the fold”. And with this in mind, after looking at some of the blogs of fellow Marketing With Alex 2.0 students, I guessed that a 3-column theme might be best.

So today, I have spent a couple of hours searching and experimenting with various themes. The current incumbent is called Jules Joffrin, but depending on when you read this, it may have changed again

What I like about it is that it actually has one sidebar spread over the width of two columns. (If you speak HTML, I think it’s a case of  “COLSPAN=2″, but don’t quote me on that !) This let’s you feature one or two widgets prominently and then you can “save space” by having list-type widgets alongside each other in the two columns below.

What I don’t like is that something is drawing in dotted lines in the table in the sign-up form. I have done a little experimentation and I think that it’s probably down to the style sheet associated with the theme. And although I can get by in HTML, my CSS is a lot shakier.

However, I have spent more than enough time on it for the moment and I have to be doing other things. So it’ll probably stay like this for a while, but I will look at some other themes when I get the chance.

Meantime, feedback is always welcome, particularly if you know how to get rid of those dotted lines !