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When WordPress is first uploaded, either by WordPress for the .com version, or by you for a .org blog, you will be issued with the default theme.
This is generally the Twenty Ten theme, which actually is a very good basic theme to start with, as it has many adaptable features to make it look better.
It has a nice big banner, to which you can easily upload one with your corporate design, with a navigation bar under it, a single sidebar on the right with plenty of widgets to occupy it, and plenty of space for your posts.
But the trouble is, being the default theme, leaving it unaltered does shout out that you don’t know what you’re doing with your blog.
And since blog design is important if you want to give a good impression to your readers, and especially as it’s very easy to change your theme, it’s not a good thing to leave it in the same state as when it was created.
Here’s a blog I recently had fun changing its theme:
As it is a WordPress.com blog, I didn’t have to do much to the theme, just to add in the banner and put some widgets into the sidebar and footer space.
WordPress.com has over 120 themes available to download, and if you host your own blog with WordPress.org then there’s literally thousands! Most of them are free and very easy to upload and activate, and if you are blessed with knowing HTML and PHP, then the world is your oyster!
For WordPress.com users, just go to ‘Appearance’ in the left sidebar, and click on ‘Themes’, and wade through the examples until you find one you like. Selecting is made simpler by using the filter system. There is also a mechanism for previewing what your blog would look like before you ‘activate’ your chosen theme.
Then once in place you check what options are available to you under ‘Appearance’, such as the ‘Header’ and ‘Background’ links, and experiment to create your desired effect.
Populate your sidebars with appropriate widgets, upload a picture of yourself and add it to the ‘Gravatar’ widget to show off the blog’s author, and then get blogging!
And if you want to have me change your blog’s theme and enhance it with some well placed widgets, then you only have to ask (click on my logo to send me an email).
Magic Moment: Variable comment logins
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Back in the old days when you commented on a blog post you wrote what you wanted to say and then filled in the details below about yourself before publishing it. Why did you bother to do this? Well, this information accompanied the comment and allowed any interested parties to click on your name (which was usually a link back to your website, if you had filled that part in) to find out more about you.
There is another good reason for this – it’s not just humans who clicked on those links. Spiders like comments as they see them as new material that can be indexed, so a busy blog that has lots of comments is usually placed much higher in the search engines than unpopular blogs. And of course these spiders are then happily crawling over the commentor’s website too…
Anyway, this Magic Moment is about the four ways you can register yourself before you publish your comment in a WordPress.com blog. Clever apps have been incorporated that allows you to choose whatever identity you would like to comment under.
The first one is as a guest. This is where you are allowed to put in your personal data how you want it to be:
You don’t need to enter in your website or blog details, but if you have one I recommend that you do, for the reasons stated at the beginning of this post.
The second option is for those who have a WordPress account. This one is the usual preference that I comment under. This account is recognised throughout the WordPress blogging world, and your gravatar automatically comes up to accompany your comment as an extra visual presence.
Once you’ve entered your WordPress username and password, your comment will be acknowledged as a WordPress user:
The third option is via your Twitter account. A lot of people might prefer this as they are usually always logged into Twitter so registering is easy.
Once you’ve filled in your details, you’ll be logged in as a Twitterer, and your name will be linked back to your Twitter profile:
The final option is via Facebook, and the same thing applies:
And once your Facebook details have been entered in and accepted, you’ll be commenting under your Facebook profile:
For each profile you comment under, the picture icon you use for that account will show as your gravatar. As I use the same one for all my accounts so there are no differences for me to demonstrate, but be aware that if you have a silly Facebook icon, do you really want that showing up next to your comment?