Chapter 5. Enhancing Your Blog with Themes, Widgets, and Upgrades

In This Chapter

  • Giving your blog a new look

  • Adding widgets to your sidebar

  • Upgrading your free WordPress.com blog

You don't want your blog to look identical to everyone else's, do you? Although WordPress.com doesn't give you the vast array of design options that you'd have by hosting your own blog, you do have some flexibility.

The great thing about the WordPress hosted service is how easily you can change your theme to one of the alternative designs available. What's not so hot is that you can't create your own custom theme. As noted later in this chapter, you can pay a fee to customize the CSS of the template you've chosen to use, but you need to be familiar with CSS to use this upgrade — and there again, you're limited to customizing only the templates that WordPress provides.

In this chapter, you discover the WordPress.com themes that let you choose a design and format for your blog. You have some fabulous themes to choose among, all created by WordPress users. At this writing, 70 themes are available. You also explore the fun of using sidebar widgets to rearrange how your blogroll, category and monthly archive lists, and page lists are displayed.

This chapter also discusses enhancing your blog with custom CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), choosing a domain name, and increasing the amount of hard drive space on your WordPress.com account through its upgrade feature (for a fee).

Changing Your Blog's Look

It's time to choose ...

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