This 4 part blog series is intended to aid the new blogger in setting up and designing a blog that will be successful and unique. The 4 parts will be 1. Getting Started, 2. The Set Up, 3. Customization, and 4. Branding and Advertising

Building a Blog

PART 3 – Customize

Now that you have a great plan in place and have set up your blog it is now time to customize it. Since the most popular blog management system is WordPress I am going to focus on it. There are 3 major ways to customize your WordPress blog; themes, theme customization, and plugins.

The appearance of any WordPress blog can be extremely easy to alter and there are nearly endless options for its appearance. WordPress has built in a function that allows themes to be added to a WordPress blog and it will quickly and easily alter the appearance and often times the functionality of the blog.

There are many free WordPress themes available on the Internet and there are premium themes that you can buy as well. Doing a quick Google search will find themes that work for just about any niche.

Once you have found the theme that you want to use follow these instructions to set it up:

Download theme
- If the file is zipped, unzip the file
Upload the files to the theme folder
- Main blog folder > wp-content > themes
Log into your WordPress Blog
Click on the Design tab
Click on the theme tab
Select the theme you just uploaded

Thats it! The theme is now set up and you could begin to post on this new theme, but many people like to customize their blog even further.

Each theme can be customized to fit your needs. Some people like to change the colors of the text, the links, or get very deep into the coding of the theme and heavily modify the theme. To do this type of customization you need to be familiar with HTML, CSS and PHP. These tasks are beyond this post, but there are many references you can find online to help you with that.

Once you have your blog looking the way you want it to, it is time to install some plugins. Plugins are programs that add, or even remove, functionality to WordPress. They range from adding a top commenter section to the blog to filtering out spam.

Some of the plugins I use on all my blogs are Akismet (a spam filter), Crawl Rate Tracker (tracks how often your blog is visited by a search engine spider) and FeedBurner FeedSmith (a plugin that helps track and organize RSS subscriptions). There are far more plugins than this that are very useful and many can be found by doing a simple Google search.

The installation of a plugin is very similar to themes: