Those who are at the beginning using WordPress will find the support team very helpful. And you don’t even have to address to a representative to solve your problems. They are already suspected by the WordPress employees, that’s why after you sign for an account, you get all the information you need to start this properly.
To differentiate your site from the rest of the sites that are hosted on WordPress, you have to change the theme of the blog, which is selected by default as being the Twenty Ten theme. You can read more about this theme while you are on WordPress, the themes section. But like I said you want your blog to be a bit more different. Different other sites, but not different from the blogs whose authors have selected the same theme as you did. Luckily for you, there is approved that you to customize your theme.
Let’s say you want to change the theme of your blog. Make sure you keep the theme for a while and not change it from day to day. Your readers will be confused, they will consider that they have mistaken the blog and they are on your site. I have chosen the theme Spectrum just to be able to write this article. Let’s say I like theme. In fact, I really do. I like all of them. You can see how this theme works by pressing the button “See it in action”. I have to mention that all the themes available on WordPress are free. If you want to create a custom one, you are free to do it, but you probably have to pay something to WordPress. I don’t know. I stick to my free themes.
Below the “See it in action” button, you can see the stats of the theme. You can see how many people are using this theme on their blogs, on what position this theme is in the WordPress top and when was the launch date for it. This theme was launched on October 13, 2010 and since then it has attracted more than 45000 users worldwide. Pretty impressive, I might say. It was a short period and the theme managed to attract this number of bloggers.
While you are on the theme specifications, you can see above the button that allows you to check the theme in action, the features of the theme. Our theme has the following features: two columns, right sidebar, theme options, fixed width, full width template, custom menu, custom header and custom background.
We will speak about all of them separately. But now let me present the widgets available on this theme. The available widgets of this theme that can be dragged from where they are when you install this theme on your blog to the sidebar to be activated are: Akismet – you can find more about Akismet also on WordPress, I know that is one of the most popular plugins on WordPress, so it is great that it comes for free, brought by this wonderful theme, Archives – this is a monthly archive with all the posts of your site, Author Grid – you can show the world a grid of avatar images, Authors – show the author of your site, if you are more than one, Blog Stats, Blog Subscriptions – you have to add an e-mail form to your blog, to allow the people to enter their e-mail addresses in order to receive information when you post another article.
I forgot to mention that there are 104 free themes on WordPress. Let me go back to the plugins available if you use Spectrum. Box.net file sharing is another one, Calendar, Categories – a list that contains your categories in a drop-down list (here we are not referring to the list that you can see on your Dashboard when you are editing articles), Category Cloud, Custom Menu, del.ici.ous, Flickr, Image – you can display an image in your sidebar, Gravatar – you can insert a Gravatar image, Links, Meebo and many more. I advice you to enter the WordPress Website and to see more. I can’t discuss every widget here, because this would take forever.
What is so great about the widgets is that they come for free, just like the themes available on WordPress. Besides widgets, Spectrum has prepared other surprises to its users. Here they are: menus, extras, theme options, background, header, typekit fonts, edit CSS.
Let’s talk about the last option available on this theme. Edit CSS allows the user to modify the visual style of his blog. You can preview your changes made to the theme for free. If you want to save those changes, you have to purchase the CSS Upgrade option. Those who are not familiar with CSS may enter the forum which is open on WordPress related to problems in PHP and CSS. http://wordpress.com/forums/forum.php?id=3 is the place where you can find lots of info about CSS and where you can ask questions. You have to know English. You can learn more about CSS if you enter W3schools.com and also alistapart.com.
There are way more things to say about WordPress themes and about Spectrum in particular. I will review it once again tomorrow, when I will write about the menus and the extras option of Spectrum. Until our next meeting, take care!
