Now that you have Wordpress installed you probably want to change the theme to something more interesting and pleasing to the eye. When you first install Wordpress it defaults to a pretty plain blue theme.

One of the nice things about Wordpress is that there are literally 1000’s of themes out there that you can choose from and many of them are free. There are all kinds of free themes available in a variety of formats and colors. You can find themes specific to cars, dogs, planes and so much more. What theme you choose ultimately depends on what kind of feel you want your blog to have. Is it personal or is it for business?

You can install a free theme, a premium theme or a customized theme. You will pay a fee for a premium theme, but the advantage is that not as many other bloggers will be using your theme and you may have access to more support than you would if you just used a free theme.

Customized themes are unique to you. You can pay to have a theme customized exactly how you want it to look and no one else will have the exact same theme.

If you aren’t sure now, don’t worry. You can always change your theme down the road. Your theme is not set in stone so don’t spend too much time trying to decide.

To get started lets look at the free themes that are already available through Wordpress.

First, log into you dashboard and hold your mouse over Appearance.  A drop down menu will then open up.

Click on Add New Themes.

A search menu will pull up where you can select the colors you looking for, you can choose if you want a 2 column, 3 column or 4 column blog and other options as well.

Let’s choose orange and 2 column for this search. Here are a couple of the themes that pull up.

You can click on Preview to see how it will look before you install it. Once you decide on the theme you want click on Install.

This will bring up a pop up. Click on Install Now to install the theme into your Wordpress blog.

You now have your new theme installed, but it isn’t active yet on your blog. If you go to your blog you will still see the original plain blue theme. To finish, you need to click on Activate.

That’s all there is to it.  Now that you have your new theme installed you can start adding different widgets and plug ins. I’ll talk about what these are in upcoming posts.

Again, don’t worry about picking the perfect theme right away. You could spend hours searching for the right theme. Pick a theme you like and start blogging. You want to get your blog going and start building your content. Then down the road you can spend more time searching for the perfect theme. I spent way too much time trying to pick my theme and I wish I had just picked one and started blogging.

Thanks again for reading!