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 weblog. Why? Well for the reason that 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 sites.

Find free themes
The first thing to do is to search the internet for a few 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 merely select one and start with that, because quite often what looks good on the sample looks totally varying when you install it. I have even download themes and installed them, merely to find that they are not compatible with certain popular browsers.

So download several 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 several have options for alternative 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 yourblog and give it a description. “Only another WordPress website” proudly displayed on the top of your website 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 varying array of options, for example alternative ways to display the archives. Personally, I like to have the archives available on every page, but depending on what you are doing with theblog this may not be needed. Have a look through the widgets and choose 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. As for instance, I always remove the Uncategorised category from the list of displayed categories (merely 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.

Written by Keith Lunt of How To Start Blogging. Call in if you need any help or advice with earning money blogging.

Fetch important information in the sphere of free traffic – make sure to go through the webpage. The time has come when concise information is truly at your fingertips, use this possibility.