Another guest post by Praveen Rajarao of Daily Morning Coffee: Today he will help us quickly improve our blog or website.

If you read How to Setup a Professional Website you will learn how to setup your blog or website from scratch and produce a search engine optimized site. Many bloggers have tried multiple themes to suit the look and feel of the website, decided on a theme, and have spent hours or days to customize the same. After a while, when you have published several posts and modified the sidebars, added images, customized your blog-rolls, it becomes very tightly coupled with your theme. Every now and then, when you find couple of spare hours, you would go back in thought to re-design your website, but the very thought of it will bring jitters and you may develop cold-feet. It is never enough time to take up such a major project involving long hours of customization for building a new theme or redoing your categories/tags. But there is always this thought at the back of your mind to somehow make your website look better by incorporating those cool new features you would have come across in other sites.

If you find yourself in this tight spot in your blogging life, I would like to suggest these 5 quick makeover ideas for your website or blog, each of which may take no longer an hour. So here are the ways you can improve your site right now:

1. Run a Speed Test – How long does it take for your site to load? What are the pages in your website which is slowing down the whole site? Run your speed test using PingDom Tools and analyze all your pages. Once you get the result, you can get a better picture on the various pages and images your site has and which is the culprit which is slowing down the site load. Once you do this, you should see an immediate improvement in your site load speed, all without having to pay some web design company to run a health check on your site. Note that there might be some images or video files which you may not be able to discard off altogether, so you can consider hosting them on any of the “Cloud Spaces” which have come up recently(eg: Amazon CloudFront). This will drastically improve the download speed.

2. Theme Tweaks – If time doesn’t permit you to overhaul your entire theme, how about tweaking it here and there to make it more friendly to the visitors. There are several websites which has articles on website typography like – The Ten Commandments of Blog Typography. It can be little tidbits like maybe a new logo or new RSS feeds which will make your blog visually better. Though the appearance of a web doesn’t affect how a website is read, but it does matter when it affects readability. Take a few minutes to identify how your site lacks some visual pleasantness and address them to make a huge impact with a little change and minimum effort.

3. Review the Static Pages – You may have noticed that your static pages are responsible for getting your visitors to become regular readers of your blog. But over time, your static pages might have gone unnoticed by you with no regular updates or changes. Maybe it is time to upload a new picture of yours or change your contact details on your About Me page, or even modify the personal information details with latest updates about your new blogs or latest engagements.The static pages acts best in making that human connection with your readers.

4. Add a Feature – If you are long awaiting to add that new widget or a new RSS feed to your blog, now is the right time to do it. Any new additions that stand out on your blog will immediately give it a fresh appearance and thus improve your visual impact of the blog. With WordPress or any other CMS tool, it has become quite an easy task to add a new plug-in or widget and doesn’t take more than a few minutes to get it up and running.

5. Start a Poll – Constructive criticism is very helpful for bloggers. You may want to create a list of what you don’t like on your blog and start a poll asking your readers to give their thoughts on what they think is the most ‘unwanted’ item on your blog. Humans by nature like to criticize, and your readers will not lose this opportunity to point out the bad factors of your blog. This is for your advantage to improve upon those features and make your blog more reader-friendly.

Bottom Line – These are not the only ways to do a complete makeover of your blog, just keeping your eyes and mind open for new ideas and features will help you make small changes that drastically improve the appearance. It doesn’t take a lot of time to improve your blog, but just some will-power and devotion for a couple of hours should do it. Don’t you agree these are simple enough and can be easily achieved in no time?

Praveen Rajarao blogs on his website – http://www.dailymorningcoffee.com. His topics range from life to blogging to technology and how-to guides. Follow Praveen on Twitter: http://twitter.com/brpraveen.