BloggingAmigos

After you’ve got the “essentials” out of the way, it’s time to style your blog. Without knowing a thing about HTML and CSS, you can personalize your site’s look-n-feel.

There are a lot of pre-made themes out there for you to use. The best site out there for browsing these themes is themes.wordpress.net. It’s a slick site that lets you search for themes based on the features you’d like to see.

So, with all those choices out there, how do you choose the right theme? Here are a couple of things to think about:

• How many columns do you want? These will contain both your content and your extras (widgets).
• Do you want your site to stretch when people resize their browsers (fluid width), or do you want it to look the same no matter who sees it (fixed width)?
• You’ll definitely want to get a widget-ready theme. This will allow you to add… stuff… to your blog in the future. We’ll post, at some point, about widgets.

For different kinds of blogs, you’ll want different kinds of features - different types of themes. My suggestions on getting started:

Journal-Style Blogs

Start by looking for something with at least two columns. You’ll have your posts, of course, but you also have complete control over the rest of the space. And there are some pretty great plugins and widgets out there. At the very least, you’ll want to have a sidebar that displays things like your blogroll (list of links to other blogs you find interesting), a list of the latest posts and/or comments on your posts, and a list (or cloud) of your post categories/tags.

From your selection of multi-column themes, choose something that matches your content.  If your blog is a personal journal blog, choose something that reflects on your personality and have fun.  If you’ll be posting on a theme (news, politics, religion, movies) that might interest a broad audience, make sure that the theme you choose is simple enough you’ll be taken seriously.

Video/Photo Blogs

If you’ll be posting only videos or photos, you’ll want a theme that really makes your work stand out.  Try to find a theme that doesn’t have multiple columns/sidebars - rather, look for something that’s laid out with horizontal bands (like Hemingway or Squible).  Getting rid of the distractions in the sidebars puts the focus on your photography.

That’s it for now - stay tuned for more posts on templates and themes.  I’ll be writing about how to tweak and customize the look of your new theme.