Blogging Conferences

Before I get into today's post, I want to thank all my sweet followers! In the past 14 months, 501 lovely ladies have decided, for whatever reason, that BBD is worth following. I appreciate all of you and hope that BBD is a useful, user friendly resource for you to use over and over. To celebrate, I have some giveaways coming up this week, so stay tuned.

Okay, today I wanted to talk about blog conferences. There are several out there just for woman, but not always the easiest to find, so I'm compiling a list (what can I say, I like to make lists - that should be evident here at BBD). The locations vary, but hopefully there will be one near you.

Why attend? Basically, to connect with other bloggers, to network and to hopefully just learn how to blog better. I am excited to be attending my first blog conference, the Type-A Mom conference, in September, in Asheville, NC.  

• Blissdom - Nasheville, TN
• Blogalicious (for women of color) - Atlanta, GA
• Bloggy Boot Camp - various cities across US
• Blogher - New York, NY
• Casual Blogger - Sandy, UT
• Mom 2.0 Summit - Houston, TX
• Relevant - Hershy, PA
• Savvy Blogging Summit - Breckenridge, CO
• Type-A Mom - Asheville, NC

Thank you to Tamara, who writes about blog conferences at Blog Conference Newbie, for letting me know about her great site. Blog Conference Newbie lists lots of blog conferences and provides tips and tricks when attending a blog conference. If you're at all interested in attending a blog conference, her site will prove very useful.

If you know of an all-woman conference that isn't on the list, please let me know.

Delightful Dots - Great Free Backgrounds

I want to share a neat place to find beautiful and creative free backgrounds for Blogger blogs. Delightful Dots is a wonderful resource for those who like to change their backgrounds often. She has them tagged well so you can search by theme (seasons, colors, etc.) plus offers them in both two and three column layouts.

For the next two weeks she is offering custom design templates for a $25 donation to help Rex Stuart, a young boy with brain cancer (which my dad died of last year). If you love her design style and would like to help with wonderful cause, head over there now and get on her list.

Also, I want to thank her because she has Beautiful Blog Designs listed on her site and it refers lots of traffic my way and I am grateful.

Beautiful Blog Series: Good n Crazy

This week's Beautiful Blog feature is a Wordpress.org blog called GoodNCrazy.The owner, Carissa, is an amazing woman -in her life prior to motherhood and blogging, she was a molecular biologist (WOW!) but now enjoys writing at GoodNCrazy about her family, photography, parenting, food and more.

What I love about GoodNCrazy:

• Amazing, unique header! Love the navigation buttons built right into it.
• Very user friendly with a navigation menu above the header and categories in the sidebar.
• Clean, uncluttered sidebars.
• Engaging, informative About page (too many bloggers don't have this and it is important).
• Lots of white space which is easy on the reader's eyes.
• Great content, which is broken into bite size paragraphs with pictures to keep readers engaged.

Dappled Studios is the design team who created this brilliant design for Carissa. They are certainly very talented and their work is exceptional.

Congratulations, Carissa, for having such a beautiful blog! If you'd like to share this feature with your readers, here is a button for a post or sidebar.



<a href="http://beautifulblogdesigns.blogspot.com/" target="_blank"><img src="http://i190.photobucket.com/albums/z78/mikerin3/Amanda%20Padgett/FinalFeatureButtoncopy.png"/></a><br/>

New Tutorials I've Come Across

Here are some helpful tutorials I've come across in my blog hopping the past few weeks. Hope you find them as useful as I did.

How to create a Gravatar (an image beside your comment) by Darcy at My3Boybarians.

How to create a drop down menu for your labels (Blogger only, Wordpress already has this as a widget) by Jill at Sneaky Momma Blog Design.

Blogging Glossary - defining blogging terms by Melanie at Blogging Basics 101. This one is great for those new to blogging.

How to create slide show headers by Rita at CoffeeShop.

I hope you enjoy them and learn lots. Each place has a lot more tutorials to offer, so if you have time stay and browse around.