I shall do some blog carnival entering today

I guess we all need to reevaluate and improve at some point, and I figured this was as good a time as any. As you mention, blog design and template is a very important part of the mix. It might not be more important than good content, but it certainly encourages people to read the good content, so I can see your point of choosing a great layout for your future projects.

As far as Blog Carnivals are concerned, they’re actually quite straightforward and forgiving. So, I present:

The Blog Carnival Mini Tutorial

- Decide on one or a handful of your posts you want to “publicize”.

- Go to BlogCarnival.com. I like to use their master list of carnivals available here: http://blogcarnival.com/bc/clist.html

- Once there I usually sort the list based on “Next Edition”, which lets you submit to the upcoming carnivals quickly.

- Go through the list and if your chosen post seems related to a particular item, click on it (opening in a new window or tab makes things faster).

- If after reading the description page you still think your post would fit, click on the orange button which says “Submit Your Blog Article to this Carnival”.

- In the form, enter your post URL and when you TAB out of that field the site will try to fill the other information automatically by looking at your site. Fill in the missing bits and submit.

- Wash, rinse and repeat. Simple.

Hope that helps and looking forward to seeing what you have in store for your future blogs.

Samir

I am reaching a simialr stage too where I need to prepare my blog for moving forward and start some new blogs too.

I am seeing some amazingly designed WP blogs out there and I really need to make sure that the next personal blog I start employs a good design.

I also need to start getting onto blog carnivals but I still have not quite worked out how they work!!