Someone says design is half of your success. I don’t think it’s true, but I agree the appearance is important part and you shouldn’t neglect it. One of the huge advantages of Wordpress publishing system is fact, that you can find millions of free nice looking designs on the internet. If you want your sites to look even more original, you can choose to pay for professional looking theme or hire someone who does it for you.

Every time when I start a new site I try to keep my expenses as low as possible. So for every start-up I use free theme. If my project gets more traffic and I see I’m successful, I can hire someone to design special Wordpress theme for me of buy some pre-made solution.

If you don’t want to read the whole article, you can watch my video about choosing Wordpress Theme, connecting to FTP server, uploading and installing theme on your blog.

Where to find free nice looking themes?

Let me just briefly explain to you, why so many developers make Wordpress themes for free. The reason is that they insert their link to their sites usually into the footer to your blog. Search engines like one way links and developer’s site will appear higher in the search results. It’s a win-win situation.

On the most of sites with Wordpress themes you’ll be able to preview chosen theme. That will help you to decide what appearance would suit your blog the best. Let’s take a look on some sources of your future design:

• Wordpress.org- Official free themes directory where you can find almost 800 themes available for immediate download.
• FreeWordPressThemes.com- Site where I found many great themes for a lot of my sites.
• TemplateBrowser.com- Simple site that provides a lot of Wordpress themes. II used them couple times.
• SmashingMagazine.com- Good post about 100 Excellent Free Wordpress Themes.I used couple of them.
• SixRevisions.com- Article about 50 Beautiful Free Wordpress Themes. I used couple of them.
• WPThemesFree.com- Big database of design for Wordpress.
• And much more. For more results search for themes in your search engine.

I didn’t like any free theme. Where to find premium one?

There are a lot of sites offering amazing themes and charging some fees for downloading it. You can either google them of look on Woo Themes or ThemeSpinner. One theme that really kicked me and almost immediately persuade me to download was Thesis Wordpress Theme. I know a lot of people using it and I’m thinking of implementing this theme on my blog too. Other way is to pay a professional who will design it for you. Try to search on Elance.com.

We found nice theme we want to implement on our sites but we don’t know how. Now is the time to connect to your FTP server. There is lots of software to use. You can look closer on FileZilla, FireFTP or Fetch for Mac. Personally I have use Total Commander and Dreamweaver. You can choose to try one of those or follow my next tip how to log in your server without installing anything. We’ll need just My Computer (File Explorer) or Internet Explorer. Following solution works fine with DreamHost web hosting I use and described before in my review.

How to connect to FTP server?

1. Open My Computer (You need to have Windows operation system for this). It’s usually located on your desktop.
2. Type ftp://yourdomain.com/ (instead of yourdomain.com put the name of your domain) into address line and press enter.
3. You’ll be asked for username and password, fill it.
4. After a few seconds you should be logged in. Open folder called the same name as your domain (yourdomain.com).
5. Now you are on the server folder, where your publishing system Wordpress is installed. Go into “wp-content”, then click on “themes”.
6. Download theme into your computer from the site where you found it. Now it’s compressed so you have to extract it (if you don’t know how to do it, take a look here).
7. Drag the folder from your computer to My Computer window into the folder I described before.
8. After the copying process you should see your new theme folder on your server.

How to install theme in your administration panel?

1. After files are uploaded you can log in into Wordpress administration panel and click on “Appearance” link in the left menu sidebar.
2. Find your theme on “Manage Theme” page that appeared and click on it.
3. The system will show you a preview of your site. If you like it, click  „Activate NameOfChosenTheme“
4. After that you can check your homepage. You appearance should change.

Now you can download Wordpress theme, upload it on your server and install it in your administration center. You can have almost unlimited number of themes and change them every day. I recommend you to don’t change it so much. Your audience doesn’t want to see different design and structure of your blog every time.

In the next post we’ll talk about great plugins you need to install in order to make your blog works better and be successful.

Similar posts:

• Oneclick WordPress installation
• Best publishing system for your blog

Log in to the administration center on your blog (type: www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/). You’ll see there a lot of buttons and options what to do. For the first time will just try to write a simple post. Search for sidebar on the left side of the page and click on “Add New” link under “Posts” menu.

Fill your headline and your content in. You can format your text, bold it, make bullets, change color of the text and much more. You can assign some category to your first post (you probably have to create one). If you like to add some picture, use small icon of the picture on the right of “Upload/Insert“text. After the click you can search for an image from your computer and upload it to your server without using FTP. If you are satisfied with the result simply click on “Publish” button and you are done.

It was that simple. On your main page you can see your new post displayed.

Next time we’re going to show how to connect on your FTP server and upload new theme. Are you excited about new design for your own blog? Read my next article.

Another posts:

• How to host your blog the best way?
• DreamHost web hosting review
• Choosing Wordpress Theme
• How to choose the right Niche?
• Why did I create this blog?
• How to choose the best domain name in 10 steps?
• Best publishing system for your blog
• Oneclick WordPress installation

As I mentioned earlier in the post about web hosting your blog, we’ll use DreamHost hosting to set up our blog. In their administration panel every customer has One-Click Installs. their system can install WordPress (along with other open source software like Joomla- publishing system, ZenCart- online store solution, phpbb- great free forum and much more) with just one click. Let’s take a look how to do it:

1. Go to DreamHost Panel and log in.
2. Click on “Goodies” option in left sidebar menu and then choose “One-Click Installs“.
3. Here you can choose from 3 options. You want to choose “Install new website software- Advanced mode”. From the list of different software mark WordPress.
4. Bellow this you can see column “Install to: “. Here you choose the domain you want to use. Don’t fill anything after „/“ if you want to install WordPress in the root folder.
5. Next step is selecting the database. You want to choose “Create a new database now“.
6. On the right from  „New Database Name: “ put some name (i.e. blogdatabase)
7. On the right from “Use Existing Hostname: “ choose „Create a new hostname now…“. Then fill mysql into first text area and choose your domain.
8. In “First User:” you want to choose “Create a new user now…”. Fill username and password (i.e. blogger and bloggerpasw789).
9. That’s it! Now click “Install it for me now!” button and you are done.

After several seconds you should get Success Message that says WordPress will be installed for you in 10 minutes.

Now you can relax and enjoy the feeling something is working for you. After 10 minutes you should receive an email notification that says the system was installed correctly. If you didn’t get any email, just check your domain or go to Support->Support History and the message should be there.

There is a video of the whole process if you have trouble to figure out from my description:

On you domain you’ll see welcome WordPress page. All you have to do is fill “Blog Title” and your email. Then click “Install WordPress” button. In step 2 you have to copy automatically generated password for admin user. If you don’t, you should receive the same information into you email inbox. Now Log in button and fill username “admin” and password. You are in administration panel of the newest version of WordPress. On main page (http://www.yourdomain.com/) you can see a new blog with default appearance. For better understanding there are screenshots of what you have to do:

Welcome WordPres page:

Success page with login information:

Log in site:

Administration panel on your site:

Great job, now you have your very own blog and you can start blogging. You can mess around, discover all features and functions. In the next posts I’ll show you how to configure your blog the best way, how to write your first post, how to change appearance, how you can implement useful plugins, how to optimize WordPress for Search Engines and much more.

Similar posts:

• Choosing Wordpress Theme
• Best publishing system for your blog

Let’s start from beginning. On their homepage there is something I don’t like so much. They keep their home page really short. There is almost no information about their services, only signup button. If I were them, I would definitely described more what’s going on and what do I offer.

After clicking on Signup button you will be redirected into the signing up process which is easy to follow. They keep it as short as possible. You can see an extra options a bonuses you can order, they’ll give you a free domain name.

DreamHost accept various types of payments like Credit card or PayPal. You can use whatever type you want. Their prices are low. If you host over one hundred sites like me, it’s super cheap and amazing. For this price you’ll get unlimited disc space and you can add unlimited number of domains. This can be useful especially later.

Their administration system is well-arranged. It doesn’t matter if you manage your domains, MySQL databases or One-click installations. You can find everything in main menu sidebar on the left. One thing I like is support team. They can help you with any problem. There is a good system for contacting support. They answer fast.

Great feature for every blogger-beginner is One-Click Installation. You can literally install various types of open source software on your domain in a second. You can choose from WordPress and Joomla (publishing systems), ZenCart (online store platform), Gallery (photo manager) or phpbb (online forum) without any need of handling databases, copying files on FTP, rewriting etc.

Other thing that amazed me was integration of Google Apps that allows me to use Google Email, Calendar, Docs, Sites and Chat just for my domain. Personally I use the email the most. It automatically set up everything I need so I can register to my Google Email by typing (mail.yourdomain.com) and I have an opportunity of using Gmail for your own domain for free. If you want to set up Google Apps account with regular hosting your have to go through a process of authorization and it can take couple hours to get is done completely. But with DreamHost everything is ready to use immediately.

I have been using DreamHost for over half year and I have I’m satisfied with it. Sometimes I had problems with their administration system when I used Opera internet browser (I thing it was generating security code for adding a new domain). I also remember one time when their database system was broken for about hour. But over all I really like this web hosting and I would definitely recommend it to everyone who wants to start own blog and later maybe own professional career in order to make money online or already has some sites and blogs.

Visit DreamHost.com homepage.

There are screenshots of what I was talking about:

Similar posts:

• How to host your blog the best way?

It’s really important to choose the right one, because your success depends on it. In competition of many publishing systems I recommend WordPress as the best solution for you. Many of my sites (including this blog) are powered by this platform and I’m 100% satisfied with this free solution.

You can also try another system. Some of them are great too; maybe you’ll like some other one.

• Joomla!
• Blogger (online solution)
• Blog Engine
• Serendipity
• Movable Type
• Dotclear
• Nucleus CMS
• Life Type
• Boast Machine
• Text Pattern
• b2evolution
• Eggblog
• Zomplog
• Subtext
• TriptychBlog
• Presstopia Blog

The main reason why I recommend WordPress is (beside the fact I love it) offered support and easy solution that can be installed in a few seconds (I’ll show this later). On official page you can see a lot of professional programmers cooperating together, tons of plug-ins and themes ready to download and much more. If you hear about WordPress for the fist time I recommend visiting WordPres.org and reading about this amazing project.

I don’t force you to use this publishing system, but it works well for me and I want you to be successful and offer you a great solution so you can feel comfortable in blogging. Later in my next posts you will discover the biggest advantages of WordPress. For example in next article I will show you how to install and prepare this publishing system just in a second using DreamHost hosting! You don’t have to deal with MySQL, copying files on FTP, removing and editing HTML code- just click the button.

Similar posts:

• Choosing Wordpress Theme
• Oneclick WordPress installation