A Step-By-Step Guide To Setting Up Your Own Blog for Newbies - Part 3

Welcome to part 3 of my tutorial on how to setup your own blog. In part 1, you’ve seen what kind of web hosting you need and in the second part I’ve shown how to install Wordpress through Fantastico Deluxe. Now for this third part, we’re going to see how to change the look of your blog.

How To Change Your Wordpress Theme

There are plenty of free website where you can find free Wordpress themes. Here are some of my favorite ones:

• Wordpress Themes @ Wordpress.org
• 100 Excellent Free Wordpress Themes @ SmashingMagazine.com
• FreeWpThemes.net
• SEO Wordpress Themes @ CourtneyTuttle.com

If you’re willing to spend a little money to get a professional theme, have a look at Unique Blog Designs’ Citrus Theme. It’s a pretty awesome theme loaded with features and is a great way to start a blog with personnality.

Downloading a Wordpress Theme

Ok so let’s start by downloading one of these free Wordpress theme. For this tutorial, I’m gonna use this one from FreeWpThemes. Download the zipped theme to your hard drive and extract its content with your favorite compression tool (such as Winzip or WinRar).

Uploading the Theme to Your Web Server

Next, using a FTP client such as Filezilla, upload the content from the archive to your website. The theme folder must be uploaded to /public_html/wp-content/themes

Enabling the New Wordpress Theme

Once the upload is completed, open your web browser to http://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-admin and log in using the information you’ve provided when installing Wordpress through Fantastico. Select the Design tab at the top and click on the Hot Air Balloons theme (or whichever theme you’ve uploaded).

From this point, you can now see a preview of the newly uploaded theme. Click on Activate to make it the current theme.

If everything went correctly, the new theme should now be enabled. Click on the Visit Site button at the top to get a look a your new blog theme.

So what’s next?

Well there are still a few things to do at this point. Here’s what we’re going to see in the upcoming posts:

• Basic Wordpress configuration
• Useful Wordpress plugins and how to install them
• Submitting your sitemap to Google

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