I’ll assume you have chosen and registered a name for your blog, and you have decided to go the WordPress route. Now let the fun begin.

You have, of course, read dozens of blogs before you decided to start your own, right? And you have admired a lot of these blogs for their excellent design, right? Well, you too can have a design worth noting, and you can have it for free.

Finding a good theme

  1. You can always start by googling “free wordpress themes” and viewing the results.
  2. My best place, though, is here, where there are thousands of free themes to look through. There is an excellent search facility, to help you narrow down the options.
  3. Visit some of your favourite blogs and check if they have released a free theme. Plenty of bloggers do, because it is an excellent way to market themselves. For instance, CopyBlogger has a truly excellent theme for download.

What to look for in a theme
First, you must know whether you are going to have ads and adsense on your blog. If the answer is yes, you must be careful in your theme choice, because only certain styles work effectively.
If you are going to monatize your blog, I suggest you choose a three column theme (Like this blog), so you can keep your ads and navigation tools more visible. There is also a strong suggestion that ads should be placed on the same color background as the rest of your content, so that they seem to merge more with your blog.

If you are not thinking of monetizing your blog, then you have far more options. In fact, your best bet is to visit here and start browsing and downloading.

Downloading themes
You can download as many themes as you like, and you can also store as many themes as space allows on your server. Swapping between themes is easy (and fun) so don’t be afraid that any choice you make today is a permanent commitment!

  1. Download all your themes into a specific folder on your computer (I use wordpress_themes). That way, you will always have them in one place when you decide to start another blog etc. If the themes are in .zip format, unzip them into this folder.
  2. Using your FTP client (ask your webhost which one they recommend if you are new to this) upload your themes into the wordpress/wp_content/themes folder. You can have as many themes in that folder as you like.
  3. Once all your themes are uploaded, visit your WordPress admin page. Go to Presentation>Themes. You should see a visual representation of all your chosen themes, including the two that came with WordPress.
  4. Click on any theme to have it INSTANTLY applied to your blog.
  5. View your blog, and see if you like the new theme. If not, repeat the process until you are thrilled with the result.

Some pointers:
All themes can be modified using the Theme editor. If you are familiar with CSS and PHP , this should not be a problem. If you are not familiar with CSS, now would be a fun time to start.

Even though you can change themes at your wish, remember that any specific tweaking you make to the theme code pages do not carry over into the new theme. For instance, even though all your posts and pages will carry over, if you adjusted your sidebar.php page to include your photograph, you will have to place that photograph manually into your new theme.

It is a good and honest practice to keep the design credits of the theme’s designer untouched when you use a theme.

You can find much more information on themes on WordPress official help pages.

You Should Also Check Out This Post:

More Active Posts: