How to make your own blog; the theme

// July 1st, 2007 // wordpress

I am writing a manual on how to start your own blog because of the requests I got in the last few months. The first step was to get a domain and hosting, the second to install wordpress. After this we are going to choose a nice theme for the blog.

One of the nicest things about WordPress is the big community developing this software. There are a lot of themes available you can easily put on your blog. I’m currently using a customized version of Peaceful Rush made by Small Potato. My previous blog was using the Hemingway theme.

To install a theme you need to download it, unzip the file and put it in your wp-content/themes folder. When you go to your WordPress dashboard you can select the theme under “presentation”. It’s amazingly easy to tweak your blog in a few minutes.

The best place to look for a theme is the WordPress theme viewer website. You can sort the themes by selecting some of the options like color, number of columns, sidebar or width. When you find a nice theme you can look at a live demo to see if you like it. There are a lot of other websites where you can find themes like the wpdesigner website. Or you can simply use google.

If you run into a website that is using WordPress but you can’t find the name of the theme try to look in the stylesheet. Most of the times you can find the authors information here.