Blogging Way of Life

Default wordpress theme is eye candy and you may be loving it but you need to personalize your blog’s look. Even if the last design you made with your computer was painting a house and a tree with paintbrush at the age of six, don’t panic! Wordpress has a huge source of free themes in the internet. If you make a few Google searches you can find many free themes for your blog. (I will make a list of good free themes later) First let’s get an opinion about basic structure of wordpress themes.

The classic wordpress theme consists of a header; 2 columns (main index page and sidebar) and a footer. Before searching for themes make clear what you want. Do you like a blog with 3 columns or 2 columns, do you want the sidebar on the right or left. If you don’t want to get lost inside themes design your blog layout on paper and choose from themes which fits your blog best.

Personalize your theme: If you found the theme matching for your layout design but the images are about the life of cows. Still don’t panic! You can personalize your theme independent of the original design. When you download the theme you can see the images folder under your theme files. In the images folder you can find the images you can edit to change the themes background, header image and etc.. I have liked a theme about real estate and changed the image files to match my subject. See the difference =>

Before the Changes

 After the Changes

Don’t forget to change the background color on all images . When you finish the changes upload the theme folder to themes directory under wordpress content and select the theme from admin panel. (Important: You have to implement the adsense code again after adding a new theme)

If you like this post please add to:

Okay here is the deal, the first thing we got to do is start up our blog. (A crucial suggestion)

The mostly known, open sourced, free and easy to start blog is Wordpress. You can download the necessary files from the Wordpress and actually start blogging following their “Famous 5-minute install”.

For installing our blog we need a host which supports a Mysql and PhP. You can choose from a variety of free hosts but bear in mind that they can include their own ads in your blog and they can cause problems as your traffic goes up. Also owning your own domain name at first is a good idea because you wouldn’t like to change your address while your traffic is going up. After some research I decided to use bluehost which can be considered cheap and reliable. They also register your domain name with hosting for free. The total cost is approximately 95$/year. So you can choose to spend some money for hosting and domain name from the start and prevent the problems later on or you can choose to try your luck for free.

After you set up your blog you can easily start posting using the wordpress admin panel. Now take a deep breath and let your fingers pump out your brain to the keyboard..

Next step; “how will we start earning money?”

If you like this post please add to: