Making Your Blog Look Pretty

Part 8: Not even a pretty face.

We left off the last session of this course having just created a WordPress blog.

WordPress blogs, as you saw, are very easy to set up, but they suffer from a few disadvantages ‘out of the box’. The primary one being that they are incredibly boring to look at! The default template is very dull – but the good news is that changing the look of a WordPress blog is really, really easy.

You don’t need to know a thing about HTML or CSS.

There are thousands of templates available for great looking WordPress blogs and all you have to do is find one you like, download the files to your computer, unzip them and upload them to your server.

Then, in WordPress itself, you click on an image of the new template and that’s it – your blog will look great.

It is another one of those things that sounds complex, but when you see it with your own eyes, it is very simple, so take a look at the next video in our series to see how the new imkickstart blog gets a smart new look.

First a quick admission – and an object lesson learned…

In the last part of this course I set up the blog in the root directory of the imkickstart.com domain. That would have been fine, except for the fact that in my haste I failed to make a note of the password I used to enable me to access the admin area of the blog.

Doh!

So this morning I’ve had to uninstall the blog and reinstall it. In the process I decided that I’d rather have it in a subdirectory of the site, so the URL to see it is now http://imkickstart.com/course/

See – even those of us who have done it hundreds of times can make a mess of it sometimes, but it really doesn’t matter. There are very few mistakes you can make that take more than a few minutes to put right.

Don’t let the fear of messing up stop you. I – and everyone I know – make mistakes all the time, but we just move on.

On with today’s video: http://www.keywordlsispy.com/imkickstart/video5/

There’s one more thing to do when, like with this blog, you put it in a folder. If you don’t yet have anything in the root directory of your website – in other words, you haven’t yet created an ‘index’ or ‘home’ page, then you may inadvertently have a security risk on your site.

Taking my domain as the example, typing http:/www.imkickstart.com into a browser would not lead to a page because I haven’t made one yet. In that case, the browser will view your site’s directory structure and any other files that are stored in the root directory – and you may well not want people to have access to that kind of information.

Plugging the security hole is very easy. All that is needed is to create file called index.htm or index.php and put it into the root directory (sometimes called the public_html directory.

If you make a blank file in a text editor, save it as index.htm and then upload it to your public_html folder, your problem is solved. Anyone who types in your website address will get blank page.

But that’s a bit rude, don’t you think? I’d rather send them to someplace useful than just show them a blank page. And where could be more useful than your blog?

In my case, I typed the following into a text editor:

<?php header(‘location:http://imkickstart.com/course/’); ?>

and then saved it as index.php. Note that it should be all on one line with no linebreaks.

Now, when you type http://www.imkickstart.com in your browser you should be redirected seamlessly to the front page of the new blog. And the security risk in plugged.

Next session we will change the default settings in the blog to make it more SEO and user friendly, add a few really useful plug-ins to add to the functionality and, finally, make the first blog posts.

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