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It’s all very well having a good content on your blog and great plugins doing work for you but if this is the place where people are going to come to read about you, then you certainly don’t want it looking unprofessional or amateurish.

To fix this you need to change your blogs theme. At this point most people will take the simple route and go to search among the many free WordPress themes that are available. For the majority of people just getting started, this is probably the best thing to do, especially if you’re working on a budget.

However, if you’re anything like me, you’ll be quite picky and want your blog to look a certain way with a certain colour scheme etc. In this case, you have a few options;

• You understand HTML, PHP and CSS and therefore will be able to modify a theme to get it looking exactly the way you want it.
• You’re willing to hire someone to design your blog theme for you.
• You make a one time payment and purchase the Thesis Theme. With this theme, you can get your blog laid out exactly how you want it without having to know any coding at all. You select the relevant options and this theme automatically does all the coding for you. Its design also has built in optimised SEO, so that’s one less thing for you to worry about.

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I recently taught you how to get started online by installing WordPress to get your blog underway. I hope you took action and now have your own blog with some content on there.

The next action to take with your blog is to get some plugins installed and activated. Plugins allow you to do almost anything with your WordPress blog.

Below I will explain how to install and activate Plugins on your blog and then I will list a load of plugins that I believe you may find useful with your blog. I’ll provide a brief description and also link to each for your convenience.

How To Install WordPress Plugins
First of all you will need to login to your blog at http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/. Enter your username and password to get to your WordPress dashboard and then click on the Plugins link in the menu down the left hand side.

This will display a few options underneath the Plugins option. Click on Add New.

You will now see a new page with a search option. Simply search for the name of the plugin that you want and then click on the install option that displays to the right of the plugin description.

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