How to customise your Word Press blog

Given that a blog is essentially a list of chronologically ordered posts, you might think the potential for creative flair was limited and it’s fair to say that many blogs look the same as one another.

However, there are some blogs that do look amazingly different while some don’t even look like blogs at all. Although these über-blogs may be created by design professionals and CSS geeks, an increasing number are published by bloggers with scant knowledge of design or coding.

The most recent release of Word Press, version 2.7, makes blog customisation easier than ever. There’s a growing library of both free and paid-for themes which you can install and apply in minutes.

With a little knowledge of CSS you can individualise your blog, add a company logo, change the typography and colour scheme and even redesign the navigation.

If trendy themes and custom style sheets aren’t for you, then you can still stand out from the crowd and make your blog a better fit for your content by using the customisation features in the Administration panel and by adding widgets and plug-ins.

In this guide we look at some of the customisation options open to those who are hosting their own Word Press blog using software from www.wordpress.org. If your blog is hosted on wordpress.com, there is much less scope for customisation, so maybe now is the time to think about taking control and making the leap to self-hosting (see 'Hosting your own Word Press blog' later).

Before making any changes to your blog it’s always advisable to back up both your blog content and database. The excellent Word Press codex provides advice on how to do this.

Customising from the Dashboard
The first time you see your blog it will display using the default ‘Kubrick’ theme. This is a two-column layout with your posts on the left and widgets in a sidebar on the right (see 'Improve your design with a widget' later).

The Appearance sub-panel on the admin panel provides some customisation options that will take you a short distance away from the default theme and help you get your pages looking the way you want them. The Manage Themes sub-panel, which displays when you click Appearance in the main navigation menu, allows you to select from the available themes.

Editing the default theme
A white title on a round-cornered rectangle with a blue graduated fill announces to the world that your site is a Word Press blog. It’s easy to change this ­ all you need to do is click Header Image and Colour in the Appearance panel and click the buttons to change the font and background colours.

If you want to radically alter the look of the header, you’ll need to resort to some more advanced tinkering ­ - see the section on customising CSS for more information.