Blogging 101 – Choosing a Theme and Widgets

In Part 1of my Blogging 101 guide, I gave a brief overview of how I would like to tackle the creation of my first blog.  Now it’s time to get my hands dirty and begin to give the blog a good look and feel.  Since this is an experiment in creating my first blog, I want to start off with minimal expenses.  Therefor, I’m going to try to use a free WordPress theme to start.  Once I feel that the blog has matured a little, I may decide to look for a custom blog design.  You’ll see why shortly.

WordPress Themes

I did a Google search for “free wordpress themes” and found about 8,370,000 hits!  Thankfully, most of the sites contain duplicate content of the same themes.  I must say, you could spend hours-and-hours looking through various themes and drive yourself mad quite quickly.  I tried to help narrow the themes I was looking at to those that worked with widgets and two columns on the right.  I’ve seen this setup on lots of newer blogs and I think the layout works well, especially once ads are added to the blog.

I also spent some time visiting other blogs to see how theirs looked and how functional they were.  Again, the blogs that spent the time and money to customize themselves looked the best and gave the viewer the best overall web experience.  But for now, I’m going to stick with the free themes.

From the selection I had, I narrowed it down to two: illacrimo and bloggingpro.

Both are widget ready and have the dual columns on the right.  While neither is great, it’s a start and I didn’t want to spend weeks searching for just the right theme.  In the end, I chose the illacrimo theme created by Design Disease.

What about Widgets?

I know these widget-ready blog themes must irritate the hell out of the web-purists out there, but I’m a blog newbie and don’t have the time right now to try and tweak the code to insert the new modules.  That being said, I’ve looked at a few blogs, and I think I’m going to start out with the following basic widgets and add-ons:

Widgets:  Recent Post, Categories, Recent Comments, Calendar and Archives

Add-ons:  Akismet for blog spam, WordPress Stats for viewing statistics, and Google XML Sitemaps for auto-generating sitemaps.

There are many more widgets and add-on customization that can be done, but I’m going with this as a start and I’ll tweak as needed.

By adding the above mentioned widgets and add-ons, I’m ready to add some basic content and begin work on generating web traffic.