How to Create A Personal WordPress Blog?

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This post is part of a series on building better WordPress blogs. You can find links to all posts in the series at the bottom of this page.

Back in the distant past (otherwise known as the turn of the century), blogging was something of a niche hobby, typified by “personal bloggers”. Online journals began springing up all over the internet, with people all too eager to reveal their personal musings to the world.

These days, blogging is arguably the fastest growing form of content production, with over 70% of respondents in a recent survey stating that they read blogs. And as far as I can tell, personal blogging is as popular as ever. I am willing to bet that a healthy proportion of experienced bloggers reading this article started blogging with some form of personal online journal (I know that I did).

But as a personal blogger, where do you start? Your blogging budget is probably non-existent, and your priorities are probably entirely different to most. But you’re building a blog for a reason — you still want to create something to be proud of. With that in mind, this article will take you through the most common things to consider when building a personal blog.
Setting Up Your Blog

As a personal blogger, you may have literally no budget. So although self-hosted WordPress is the best option, you may wish to start with a free hosted WordPress.com blog.

If you do choose to go down the WordPress.com route, the usefulness of this guide to you stops here. You will be unable to pick from any and all themes available across the internet, and plugins are a no-go. In reality, a self-hosted blog will only set you back a few bucks — it’s probably something that you can afford to shell out for.

Purchasing your own domain and hosting and setting up a self-hosted WordPress blog is a pretty simple process — just check out these two posts:

3 Simple Steps to Setting Up Your First Self-Hosted WordPress Site
Getting Started with Your WordPress Site’s Settings

Once you have your blog up and running, it’s time to move onto the fun stuff!
Choosing a Theme

You may be aware that there are an enormous selection of free and premium WordPress themes available across the internet. But as a personal blogger, you are probably not particularly interested in purchasing a theme. The fact is, unless your blog is going to be particularly complex, you will be able to find a free theme that suits your style perfectly.

If your blog’s theme isn’t really that important and you are simply keen to get on with blogging, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the default theme made available to you with your WordPress installation. At the time of writing, Twenty Twelve is the brand new default theme, and offers up an extremely clean and simple design, which is perfect for personal blogging:
Twenty Twelve
Twenty Twelve’s varied post formats — perfect for personal blogging.

If Twenty Twelve isn’t to your tastes, you may want to take a look at Twenty Eleven — the previous default theme. In using a theme with the official Automattic seal of approval, you can rest assured that you are dealing with a stable and efficient product. You can find a selection of Automattic’s best WordPress.org themes here.

If on the other hand you are feeling a little more adventurous, WordPress.org hosts an enormous number of free themes. The sheer choice of selection can be overwhelming, so my recommendation would be to start by browsing through our Free Themes of the Month series, which picks out only the best new themes available at WordPress.org. You can browse through the post archives here.

Once you have found a theme that you like, the quickest and simplest way to install it is by using the search function on your WordPress blog. You can find this by first hovering over “Appearance” in the sidebar and selecting “Themes”:

Installing a Theme

…then selecting “Install Themes” from the tab on the subsequent screen:

Installing a Theme

You will then be presented with a search screen, where you should enter the name of the theme that you wish to install:

Installing a Theme

The search engine will scour the WordPress.org Themes Repository for the most relevant results, which will be presented to you in thumbnail format:

Installing a Theme

Just click the “Install Now” link under the theme that you wish to use, and the theme’s files will be copied to your blog.

Once the process is complete, you will have a chance to Preview the new theme (without actually affecting your live site), or you can just go straight ahead and activate it:

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