To make a blog all you need is a host with Fantastico, the rest is pretty much done for you. Fantastico will install the script for you and there are hundreds (thousands?) of free Wordpress themes created by others that you can use. One of the traditions of this blog is to always use these free themes to show you what can be accomplished with them.

I think there are a lot of great themes out there that are so close to being wonderful. Usually when you get a theme you’ll need to tweak it to make it work for you, this is a given. Not everyone wants to put the same information out there so it’s important to make sure you spend some time on that. But you can do more.

I don’t understand Wordpress as well as some of the great designers out there, so when I find that they’ve made a great design I try and fix it up to my tastes. I found a design made by WP Designer that was perfect for what I needed, but the design had a half naked woman on it. Naturally, I couldn’t use that image, so I bought one from iStock for $1 which I also modified before putting into the layout.

I set this up back in February and it stuck with me for a while. I usually get tired of designs before they’re even finished, but I was so happy with this one, and so proud of how the template turned out. Just a minor change and very little cost made this theme very personal and it looked great! Around summer I decided it was time to change up and I set out to find a new theme.

My needs were basic, I needed a 3 column theme that looked nice. After trying quite a few nice, but poorly coded themes,  I gave up and went back to my last one. But it really was time for a change, so I searched through iStock again for something I might be able to use.

The next image I found changed the entire face of my site, litterally. This image wouldn’t allow me to simply change the image, I needed to change the entire layout to suit the colors, which were completely different. I used Paint Shop Pro 7 to colorize the images and asked Jenny to help me color the words. But because the layout was the same, for the most part, and I loved the Hearts so much, I decided to install the Theme Switcher plugin that was suggested on another blog. Now you can view either theme while reading my wonderfully interesting personal blog.