November 8th, 2010 by Mike

The first part of building a WordPress site, once the framework (or program is installed) is to do one of three things. First and the simplest is to browse the thousands of WordPress Themes. As stated, the theme define how your site looks. Is it one-column, or two? Is it red or blue? Where are the buttons? On the top, down the right or left side. Once we decide on how it looks we simply tell WP to use the theme and literally in seconds, the site transforms. And this transformation is only the design… it does not effect the content of the site. So, for example, a few months down the pike you decide you like a different theme, well in just a few clicks you can transform your site from one to another. Just think what that would have cost you to have a web person do? So, now you have a fully operational blog site. And as long as you are happy with how it looks, you are set. Now all you have to do is add the content.
However, what we might find is a Theme we really like, but we don’t like the colors. Or we want to use our own graphics. Well, that adds a few degrees of difficulty and we must learn how to customize our theme. Now, as many themes are FREE, there are themes that one can buy. And usually the difference between them is the feature set, or bells and whistles. A Free theme is kinda like set in stone unless you know how HTML code or PHP. Whereas, many of the themes you buy are designed to allow you to make changes to the theme. Changing colors, pictures, headers, footers etc.
The next step after that, which encompasses the remaining two options is to learn how to customize the site on your own. This requires learning HTML and CSS and maybe a little PHP. And the more you learn, the more you will be able to be in control. So, the remaining two options would be to take the default theme that comes with WordPress, or an existing Theme and make it yours through customization.