WordPress is an amazing platform for blogging. It is easy to set up, highly customizable, and very search-engine friendly. Who wouldn't want to host their blog on WordPress? While there are other blogging platforms out there, for most people, none of them come close in terms of functionality.
The mistake that many people make when blogging is that they run through the basic install of WordPress, and then start blogging. They leave the default theme in place and ensure that their blog will look like thousands of others out there - bland and boring! While it is true that your content is probably the most important aspect of your bloggig success, the appearance of your blog will be what sets you apart from the blogging amateurs and establishes you with a professional look that you can use to brand yourself as an authority in whatever niche you are writing about.
The first place you need to look to customize your blog is in the "Theme" section. It used to be a daunting task to change your WordPress theme. You would have to search for a theme you liked, then download it to your computer, extract it, and upload the files and directories to your hosting account. With the latest releases of WordPress, this is no longer an issue. Now you can search for a theme using the "Install new theme" link and quickly install a new theme without having to deal with downloading or uploading files at all! Since it's so easy to change your theme, why haven't you done it yet?
The next place you can customize your blog is using widgets. Widgets are little pieces of code that can be used to modify the appearance of your blog. For example, you may want to put a calendar showing the dates of your archived blog posts in your sidebar. Well, if you go to the "Widgets" link, you can simply drag the appropriate widget to the sidebar section and away you go! Some widgets have options you can configure, but it's all very point-and-click, so no more digging into the code to make it look the way you want.
The last, and most powerful, way to customize your blog is to use plugins. Once again, this used to involve a lot of downloading and uploading files, but now you can search for plugins and have them installed automatically. I recommend you check out the plugins search for anything you can think of, from Twitter integration, to posting by email, to better commenting systems. There are thousands of plugins available that are developed, free of charge, by other WordPress enthusiasts.
You can learn much more about blogging and how best to create a professional and attractive blog by visiting me at http://jrbiasi.com
Author RSS Views:
Print this article
Ask about this article