How to Customize Your WordPress Blog for Beginners

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By Kristy Pruitt
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Customize Your WordPress Blog for Beginners

WordPress is a free, powerful and easy-to-use blogging platform. You can get a hosted blog on the WordPress website that offers a number of options. But if you want a truly customized blog, you’ll need to set up WordPress on your own hosting package.

Once you’ve got your WordPress blog set up, there are lots of things you can do to make it unique. And you don’t have to be a professional web developer to do them.

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Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

Self-hosted WordPress blog

Step 1

Find the perfect theme. Themes are like website templates, and they give your blog the look you want it to have. There are tons of themes available online. See the Resources section for places to find them. You can also have a custom theme designed if you like.
Step 2

Choose a theme that is widget-ready if possible. Widgets allow you to add, remove, and rearrange items in your sidebars quickly and easily. And that makes experimenting with different arrangements a breeze.
Step 3

Install a theme, or several of them. This is accomplished by simply uploading the theme folder and all of the files in it to the wp-content/themes directory. You can change themes by logging in to your administration panel and clicking on the Presentation tab.
Step 4

Find plugins for your blog. Plugins can add a wide variety of functions to your blog. WordPress comes with a couple of basic plugins to get you started, but there are many of them available. See the Resources section for links to find free plugins.
Step 5

Install and activate your plugins. The plugin file or folder should be uploaded to the wp-content/plugins directory. To activate a plugin, log in to your administration panel and click Plugins, find the name of the plugin, and click the appropriate Activate link.