You have installed WordPress, or gone to a free tool. Now you want to make it look as you want it. Where do you start?

I have to say that the default theme provided with the latest versions of WordPress is far better than the themes provided up to version 2.9.2, but even still, on the whole it is not a choice for a serious blog. Why? Well because you want to look unique. If you and thousands others are using the default theme then you are lost in the crowd of same looking blogs.

Find free themes
The first thing to do is to search the internet for some good looking free themes to start of with. There are thousands to choose from, some on WordPress.org and others on a whole myriad of other sites. Take your time and find a few that you like the looks of. I never just choose one and start with that, because quite often what looks good on the sample looks totally different when you install it. I have even download themes and installed them, only to find that they are not compatible with certain popular browsers.

So download a few themes, unzip them to your computer and upload them to your blog (if you haven’t done this before, you load the entire theme directory to wp-content/themes).

Install a theme
Now sign on as your admin user and go to appearance and look for one of the new themes. Click on it to preview and then choose activate. Then have a look at your blog and see if it looks right. If you aren’t sure, activate one of the other themes that you have uploaded and try again.

Customise it!
The customisations available to you will depend on you theme as some have options for different header colours and so on. If this is your first theme that you have uploaded you will also need to go to settings and name your blog and give it a description. “Just another WordPress blog” proudly displayed on the top of your blog does not give a serious impression!

Take a look at the side bars of you new look blog and see what changes you want to make. You might like to go to the widgets section of the appearance menu and choose a few widgets to install. You can select widgets for a whole different array of options, for example different ways to display the archives. Personally, I like to have the archives available on every page, but depending on what you are doing with the blog this might not be needed. Have a look through the widgets and select which you want to display and how.

If you are happy with a bit of PHP code then you can edit the code instead of using the widgets. For example, I always remove the Uncategorised category from the list of displayed categories (just add &exclude=1). My reason being that if I am writing off topic then it is not so essential to link to it from everywhere.

There are loads of customisations you can make, exactly what you do is your choice and you will probably be making changes for a long time.