Customize Your WordPress Blog & Build an Audience

Want to quickly give your blog a fresh coat of paint and make it stand out from the pack?

Here’s how you might customize your WordPress blog and make it uniquely yours.

WordPress offers many features that help you make your blog the best it can be.

Most of the personalization options are available under the Appearance menu on the left.

To change your theme, pick the Themes page under Appearance.

Or, you could search for a theme by name or features.

One neat way to find a theme that suites your needs is the Feature Filter.

Click Apply Filters and WordPress will streamline your choices to themes that contain these features.

This will open a popup that shows your blog with the new theme.

To choose a new header image, go for the Header page under Appearance.

Select one of the pre-installed images and click Save Changes, or upload your own image.

Click Crop Header when you’ve selected the portion you want for the header of your blog.

you’re able to also customize your blog’s background from the Background page under Appearance.

Click Save Changes when you’re done.

Note: that all themes may not contain these customization options, but many are flexible.

To add widgets to your blog, launch the Widgets page under Appearance.

You’ll see a variety of widgets available in the main white box.

Select one you want to add, and drag it to the widget area of your choice.

Different themes may offer different areas to place Widgets, such as the sidebar or footer.

Most of the widgets offer configuration options.

hit the down arrow beside its name to edit it.

Set them up as you wish, and click Save on the bottom of the widget.

Now we’ve got some nice dynamic content on our blog that’s automatically updated from the net.

If you don’t like these features, you could disable them on the Extras page under Appearance.

Build Your AudienceNow that your blog is looking nice, we can see to it others will discover it.

initiate the Privacy page under Tools to change your site’s visibility.

By default, it will be indexed by search engines and be viewable to everyone.

Each private visitor must have a WordPress.com account so they can login.

to see to it your site is discovered.

Post Blog Updates to Social NetworksMany people discover the sites they visit from friends and others via social networks.

WordPress makes it easy to automatically share links to your content on popular social networks.

To activate this feature, fire up the My Blogs page under Dashboard.

Now, go for the services you want to activate under the Publicize section.

This will automatically update Yahoo!, Twitter, and/or Facebook every time you publish a new post.

You’ll have to authorize your connection with the social online grid.

If you’d rather share links yourself on social networks, you might get shortened URLs to your posts.

This shows a graph of how many people are visiting, and popular posts.

Also ensure to check out our article on how toStart Your Own Blog with WordPress.