If you have been following my "how to set up a blog" line of blog post, you should now have your domain name, your host, Wordpress installed and ready for the next step. For those that found just this blog post, heres a little review.

Now it comes to where we are now, you looking at the default Wordpress blog template at your domain name.  You can actually just start blogging from here, but what you should do is find a template or theme that you like for you blog. There are several ways to do this. If you have the skills, you can create one yourself. If you are reading this, chances are you probably don’t know how to design a template. Don’t worry, there are other options.

  • Buy a theme
  • Use a free theme.

If you are just starting a blog for the first time, I wouldnt recommend buying a Wordpress theme or template. Buying a theme usually will get you something that may be a little nicer than what is available for free, but that isnt always the case. The main benefit to buying a theme is sometimes you can buy a theme that noone else has. There are also coders that will make a theme based on what you want, your specifications. All of that is for people who have been blogging for a while and have become quite successful. A good unique theme could cost you $700 bucks or more.

A free theme is what most of the blogs you visit have. When I first started blogging, I thought free themes would be bad, everyone would know they are free, and millions of other blogs will all have the same theme. I quickly found out that there are so many free Wordpress themes out there that all of my concerns disappeared. There are really a lot of free, really good wordpress themes. You may run across other blogs with a theme you are using, but it isn’t as common as you would think.

The first place you should look is Wordpress’s own themeviewer. (themes.wordpress.net)

Wordpress-themes

There are thousands of them there and the themes can be sorted by color, column, and a few other options. A couple of other theme sites Ive found I really like are Styleshout.com, WPthemesfree.com and ericulous.com.

How to install a Wordpress theme.

Installing a theme is pretty easy, Download the theme and if it is in Zip or RAR format, extract it.  Using your FTP client, log into your web server and brows to your themes folder. Usually "/wp-content/themes/"  upload the theme you downloaded to that folder. From there, its just a matter of logging into your wordpress admin, and finding themes under the presentation tab.

Are you ready to start blogging now? Well at this point you can go ahead and start. There are other things you can do, but they can be don’t on the fly…More on that later.