WordPress: Get Customized

Illustration of a shiny jewell in space, just like you

Now that you’ve decided on your blog’s focus, it’s time to establish a unique personal design for your blog to help you stand out and command attention in the blogosphere.

Remember to keep your blog’s look and feel consistent with your Big Idea. This will help visitors to quickly determine if they’ve found what they’re looking for. It may be tempting to choose a theme just because you like the aesthetics, so don’t forget about functionality. Also keep in mind that you can spice up your blog with photos and other media later. For now, focus on finding the theme that best suits your Big Idea.

“A great trademark is appropriate, dynamic, distinctive, memorable and unique.”
~Primo Angeli

Stage One: Choosing your theme

A WordPress Theme is the design of your blog. Much like every magazine has its own unique design, so do blogs. At WordPress.com, we currently provide you with a diverse collection of over 90 gorgeous themes (and we’re always adding more!) which you can easily preview and activate from the Appearance > Themes area of your blog’s dashboard.

Themes affect your blog’s design in a number of ways, defining the color scheme, the type of fonts used to display your text, and the overall layout of your content. Layout can be quite important, depending on the type of content you’re serving to your readers.

Let’s say you have a photo blog. In that case, you might decide to choose a theme that gives you a large, single column for your content so that you can easily display oversized images, letting them take center stage on your site. In this case, the navigation elements – the menus that let people find their way around your site – often sit at the top or bottom of the page, making as much space as possible for your content. Here’s an example of this in the Monotone theme.

On the other hand, if you’re running a news blog with lots of different stories appearing every day, you might want your readers to be able to scan as many stories as possible from the home page of your blog. In that case, something like a three or even four column theme will give you the chance to show off lots of story excerpts at a time. Here’s one called Depomasthead.

You should also consider what kind of tone you want to set for your blog. If you’re going to blog about stand-up comedy, you should probably choose a theme that has a fun, lighthearted feel to it. On the other hand, if you’re blogging about business ethics, you should probably opt for something more professional. There are dozens of themes to choose from, so look through many of them before you make a decision.
Once you begin browsing the themes, you might find the perfect one right away. If you’re having trouble narrowing it down, ask yourself the following:

What is the goal of my blog?
What kind of vibe do I want to set for my readers?
Is my blog personal or professional?
Do I want to display wide-format photos, images or videos?
Do I want to customize my header? (The header is the big top area of the blog; some themes allow you to add images or design that header all on your own)

Stage Two: How to activate your theme

When signed in, make your way to Appearance > Themes to browse the collection of WordPress themes from your dashboard.

Select Feature Filters if you want to narrow your theme search by color, column number, width, or features.

You can preview a theme with a single click. Then if you like it, click activate. If you dislike it, you can do this all over again, as much as you want. This makes it easy to come back and change it later if your content or style evolves over time.

Stage Three: Tweaking your blog with widgets

After choosing a theme, you might want to further customize your blog by adding “widgets.” Widgets are mini-applications that allow you to quickly and easily add content and special features to your blog’s sidebar. Just like with themes, we offer dozens of widgets.

Go to Appearance > Widgets in your dashboard. It’s worth exploring the Widget area and finding the ones you like. Again, it’s super-easy to add and delete widgets.

How could you use widgets to enhance the user experience? You can add a Search button, a link to your Twitter feed, or even a widget that shows your most popular posts. To see the full list of widgets and how to use them, check out Widgets and Sidebars on our Support site.

To activate a widget, drag it from the main portion of the widget page, and drop it into the sidebar section on the right of the widgets page. Adjust its settings by clicking the down arrow. Be sure to hit save and close when you’re done with a widget.

Here’s an example of what a blog with the Recent Posts, Twitter, Text/HTML, RSS, and Archives widgets looks like:

Bonus Round: Add a blogroll

If you wanted to share a set of URLs to your favorite photoblogs or link to your friends’ blogs, you could add a Blogroll by using the Links widget.

To add links to your blogroll, you’ll need to access the Links menu in the left-hand dashboard. You can include any links (not just links to other blogs) here, but be sure to categorize them under blogroll so that they appear on the widget. You can also create new link categories if you want to organize links by topic. For example, instead of one long blogroll, you might break it up into Friends, Inspiration, Favorite Photoblogs, and so forth.