Customizing Your Blog
Welcome back!
Customizing Wordpress
Before you launch your blog and make it available to the public, you will want to customize the way it looks as well as the way it functions.
We can do this by uploading a professional theme, and activating it from within our blogs admin area.
There are also a handful of plugins that I strongly suggest when optimizing your blog for best performance in search engines and blog networks.
To start, you can choose a free blog theme from any of the popular template directories online.
While paying a designer to create a customized blog theme will certainly help you gain a bit of edge over the competition, it can be quite costly, so until your blog is generating an income for you, you can always use a free theme, that is clean and well designed.
One of my favorite places to look for themes is on fellow blogger sites, rather than the popular theme directories.
The reason I tend to seek out smaller networks showcasing free templates is for the obvious reason, that fewer bloggers are likely to be using these themes.
The more common a theme is, the less appealing your blog will be since those visiting it would have seen the design on another site before.
One thing that many new bloggers tend to overlook is the unique factor.
Here are a few of the places that I scour for new blog theme releases. Some of these sites offer affordable pay-to-use themes as well, which can be a wise investment and a lot cheaper than paying for a custom design.
http://www.BlogOhBlog.com
Explore the archives for previous releases that are hidden away. Fewer bloggers will notice them, and the quality of Blog Oh Blogs themes is very impressive and easy to work with.
http://www.WPSalon.com
http://www.BloggingPro.com (search the archives)
http://www.BlogsTheme.com
If you are good with editing CSS and HTML, you could choose to purchase one of the more popular premium themes such as the widely used “Revolution” theme by Brian Gardner, but I only suggest using these themes if you have the ability to customize them so they don’t look like the thousands of others using them.
