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Every WordPress theme has one or more sidebars in it (in the case of this site, the sidebar is that gray section on the right hand side of the screen).  Sidebars contain widgets, which are modules that show specific types of information such as Archives, Links, or Categories.

The next step after choosing a theme is to configure these widgets.  This is done by going to the Appearance->Widgets screen.  You can drag and drop widgets in and out of the sidebar.  You can also reorder the widgets in the sidebar by dragging them around.  Most widgets have some sort of configurations settings (as show in the screenshot below).

One of the first things I wanted to do when I got my blog up and running was to pick a new theme. I had a few requirements that I wanted for my theme that really limited my choices. The first thing is that I wanted was a fluid layout that would resize the content to fit the viewer’s browser window. My monitor runs at a resolution of 1680×1050 and I get really annoyed at websites that run at a fixed width of around 800 pixels – it takes up less than half the width of my screen!  Another thing that I wanted was a horizontal menu just above the main content.  Finally, I wanted a theme that would display categories and tags for each post (surprisingly, not all themes do this).  Fortunately, I found one theme I liked that had all three.

WordPress makes it really easy to search for themes and install them.  From the Appearance menu, go to Themes.  There you will see the currently active theme along with a list of inactive installed themes.  You can activate, preview, or delete any of the inactive themes.  To install more themes, click on “Install Themes” at the upper right corner of the screen.  This will give you an interface where you can search for new themes.  I found the search functionality to be a bit clunky (you only get one page of “Recently Updated” themes) and the Feature Filter didn’t seem to work quite right.  I had better luck searching for themes on WordPress.org.  I would search there to find a theme that I liked and then enter the theme name into the search box on the “Install Themes” page of my website.  From there, it’s a single mouse click to install the theme.  Once it’s installed you can then activate it from the Appearance->Themes page.

Installing themes is easy – finding one you like is another matter

The first thing I did after installing WordPress and viewing my default blog page was to poke around in the WordPress configuration options to see if there was anything I wanted to change.  To do anything with WordPress, you go to the URL http://[your domain name]/wp-admin.  You will be prompted for the username and password that you set up during the WordPress installation.

When the browser loads the page, you will see a navigation menu on the left hand side.  The top section is what you use to generate and manage your content – Posts, Media, Links, Pages, and Comments.  The lower section has all of the configuration options.

WordPress Navigation Menu

Appearance is where you pick a theme and configure your widgets (I’ll cover this stuff in my next post).  Plugins is where you can add custom functionality (I haven’t added anything yet).  Users is where you manage users in case you want to have multiple people contributing to your blog.  Tools has more custom functionality that you can add (I haven’t touched this either).  Then there is Settings, where the bulk of your WordPress configuration is done.

The settings are all fairly self-explanatory and you’ll want to go through each one and configure it to your preference.  Personally, I didn’t touch many of the settings initially since I figured that the default behavior was probably good enough until I learned how things worked.  One thing that I would definitely recommend changing immediately is the Permalink settings.  You want to choose a link format that includes the post name because it makes your site much more SEO friendly.  I chose “Month and name” because I figured the odds of me having two posts with the same name in the same month were extremely slim.