Now that you’ve got your blog installed and configured, are you ready to replace that boring default design with a better one? You didn’t think you’d be stuck with that default metallic-blue and white one forever, did you? Today, we’ll show you how to find a new theme, install it, and customize it a bit. Ready?

Okay, first of all, you need to find a theme you like. How do you do that? First, you check out some theme repositories. Here are a few to look through:

• Themes.Wordpress.net
• 83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen - Smashing Magazine
• Basic Wordpress Theme Generator
• ThemePorter.com
• The Alexking Theme Browser
• WP Theme Spot

Read the rest of this entry »

Web Design from Scratch is a site that calls itself “Your complete guide to web design”. They cober a wide range of stuff from HTML/CSS to Graphic Design. There’s plenty to check out. I like their Opinions page, where they have articles on topics such as “Why Code by Hand?“. If you want to build a layout for your site/blog, then take a look. They cover nearly every aspect of design.

Well, you’ve made it this far, from the Intro Post to getting a domain and hosting to the installation of Wordpress, are you ready to start customizing Wordpress’s many settings? Today we will show you how to make Wordpress work the way you want it to. Tomorrow, you’ll learn how to install a new theme for your blog. The day after, we cover posting (and other blogging activities). We’ll cover more than that, in the days to come, but I won’t bore you with the details now. Ready to start setting some settings? Let’s go! Read the rest of this entry »

Adbrite.com offers a great ad service. It boils down to the following:

• Your site gets added to their database
• You put some ad-code on your site
• You choose how much money you want to charge every day/week/month/etc
• Advertisers can rent your ad space.
• Adbrite pays you on a NET-60 basis, letting you set the minimum check amount.

It works well. For a while, I was making $25/month off one of my websites. Unfortunately, the advertiser pulled the ad after a couple of months. Oh well.

Adbrite works great, just don’t expect to get advertisers too often…unless you get 200 unique visitors a day.

So, you’ve got your domain and hosting? Well, it’s time to install Wordpress. What is Wordpress? It’s an extremely versatile and easy to use blogging package. Wordpress is used to power a lot of blogs. This site utilizes Wordpress. It’s extremely easy to operate, once you install it? Up to the challenge? It’s not much of one if you’ve ever installed web scripts before (even if you haven’t, it’s not that hard). With this tutorial, I have no doubt that you will be able to do it. Shall we get started? Read the rest of this entry »

So, you’re serious about starting a blog. Welcome to part two of the “Starting a Great Blog” series. Today we will cover the naming of your blog (and the purchasing of a domain), and we will cover hosting. Ready? Let’s go. Read the rest of this entry »

Feedburner, recently acquired by Google, is the single, most-useful RSS tool on the planet. Feedburner re-broadcasts your feed, taking strain off your servers, and offers awesome statistics as well. If you have a website/blog with an RSS feed, you should definitely give feedburner a try. There’s a reason nearly every blog on the web utilizes it. Yeah, it’s that good.

Does design matter in the early stages of blogging? Of course it does! I wrote a post awhile back about it, but again I say design matters.

True, some blogs have become successful with bad designs, but so what? Have you noticed that the top blogs on Technorati have good designs? Take a look at the WayBack Machine. Enter a site like, oh…how about EnGadget? Take a look at the Wayback results. They’ve never had a truly bad design have they? They made sure that it looked okay. While you don’t need a really smashing design like Ars Technica, you need something passable.

Take a look at the post I wrote on my more personal blog.

Collis Ta’eed of North X East wrote an interesting post about as he put it “Thinking Outside the Blog“. I couldn’t agree more that blogs are changing, and that blogs need to set themselves apart from the rest. After all, if blogs didn’t set themselves apart, they’d all be the same, right? That aside, I think that blogs need to start looking less like blogs.

Currently, there is an overabundance of people who, as I put it in another post, think that the word blog refers to an online journal. We need to dispel that idea, forcing people to acknowledge that blogs are just another form of publishing. Unconventional design helps. After all, people can’t say “Erg! A Blog!” if the site in question doesn’t look like a blog.

Back to Collis’s post, I like the idea of blogs becoming “increasingly more sophisticated”. Wordpress, especially, is leading the way in that, with their vast amount of plugins.

“Most mainstreamers are only just starting to get blogs. For many, blogs and RSS feeds are still things they are only vaguely aware of. The current audience pool while vast is still limited.” How unfortunate, and unfortunately true. RSS is an amazing technology that makes the web a lot easier to keep track of. Then you have blogs, the ultimate publishing model.

Great job, Collis.

Have you ever thought about starting a blog? Even if you haven’t, there are plenty of reasons to. It’s a lot of fun. Take a look at some good blogs, and get the feel for blogging:

• Smashing Magazine
• ProBlogger
• The Blog Herald
• Ars Technica

You see? The term “blog” doesn’t mean what a lot of people think. It doesn’t refer to an online journal (there are waaaay too many of those annoying things). Sure, webjournals (as I call them), use blogging services, but they’re not the “Best of the Blogosphere”. They are the rubbish that sinks to the bottom (you can probably tell I don’t think much of webjournals). A blog is merely a website that features articles posted in a chronological format. You probably read blogs without even knowing it. If you think about it, you’ll realize that news sites, like LeakyNews.com or NYTimes.com, are basically blogs. What are they but news stories posted in a chronological format?

Now the question is, what do you want to blog about? Here at Webmaster-Source, we blog about things that interest webmasters. At ProBlogger, they blog about blogging. What would you like to blog about? Bicycling? Bowling? Writing? You can blog about anything…as long as you are addicted to it. You can’t write about something you don’t like doing. To blog, you must find a niche topic that interests you. I can’t help you there.

So, have you got a topic? Good.

Stay tuned. Tomorrow we will teach you about naming your blog, getting a domain, and finding hosting. We’ll also show you how to get hosting for nothing, or next to nothing.

Below are the other parts of the tutorial:

• Part 2 - Domains and Hosting
• Part 3 - Installing Wordpress
• Part 4 - Configuring Wordpress
• Part 5 - Themes
• Part 6 - Posting
• Part 7 - Spreading the Word
• Part 8 - Monetization
• Part 9 - Stat Tracking
• Part 10 - Wordpress Plugins
• Part 11 - Social Bookmarking
• Part 12 - Conclusion