Transcript for Choosing a theme for your WordPress.com blog

Deciding how your blog will look when people come to visit it... is largely going to be effected by the theme you choose to wrap your content in To take a look at your options head to the Appearance menu and select Themes As you can see there are quite a lot to choose from, but don't let that stress you out You can actually filter your content to taste, to narrow down your selection Here's how - up at the top here you'll see a drop down menu that says "Show All Themes" Open that up, and you'll see some filtering options to play with First up, you have colors - so if you have a particular penchant or... ...requirement for a certain color scheme, this is place to narrow down your selection Choose the button you like, and hit the filter button up here Another option is to filter by columns Columns work just the same ways as they do in newspapers or word processors Dividing up your content into vertical lines Single or 1-column themes give you lots of space to work with... ..and are good or large images or galleries, for instance, or... if you want to place the main emphasis on your content without worrying too much about... ...extra navigation features or... ...sidebar based content 2 column themes, as you can see, are by far the most popular. They still give you... ...plenty of space to work with in your main column, but offer a... ...narrower, second column to place navigation options, further sticky information or... ...widgets in. Three or four columns make for fast, skim reading and give you lots of space for... widgets, menu options and so on, but at the expense of having... ...less space for galleries, photos, video or other content that might take a lot of width on screen Fixed width themes will always stay the same width no matter... what size your reader's browser window is... whereas fluid or flexible width themes will resize... ...according to the window they're viewed in, at least up to a point Depending on your layout and content, one or the other might work best for you Next up in the list of filters, we have various options Some themes for instance have a "custom header" option... ... that will let you put your own image at the top of your blog Others have the ability to customize the color scheme Or, include extra theme options from the Appearance menu The best thing to do is have a play with your options here to see how much and what you need to use Finally, in the miscellaneous section, you've got various descriptive keywords Some describe design, like "minimalist" or "flowers"... ...others, function, like the Prologue microblogging theme A nice theme for posting short messages to a group blog Hopefully that gives you a better idea of the decisions you can make... ...when choosing a theme