The document provides instructions for customizing a WordPress site, including choosing a theme, adding widgets to the sidebar, and managing posts and pages. It explains that themes determine the overall design and layout of the site, widgets allow adding elements like menus and links to the sidebar, and posts and pages can be created, edited, and deleted through the manage section.

1. CUSTOMISE YOUR SITE Introductions

2. Return to your dashboard (you can get there by clicking up here) Click on “design”

3. Let’s start with Themes. The “Theme” is the design that is applied to your site. Wordpress comes with a standard set of themes for you to use, so you don’t have to have any design or coding experience. Obviously, if you can design and code you can start to customise your blog to your exact requirements, but you’ll need the downloaded (as opposed to web hosted) version of Wordpress. The web hosted version comes with about 50 themes. To select a theme, just click on it and you will see a preview of your site using that theme. So, for example, if I choose “Almost Spring”...

4. ... I can see an example of how that theme looks with my content. Experiment with a few themes to see one you like. Bear in mind that there are significant differences in the way themes use things like categories, tags, comments, page indexes and so on. As you learn more about your blog, you may want to change your theme. You can do that at any time. Click on the “x” to close this preview

5. This theme, for example, has the menu items at the bottom of the page, rather than the side, and puts the title of the post off to one side.

6. This theme has three columns – that can be good if you use a lot of widgets or have a lot of menu items/categories

7. This is a nice clean theme. I’m going to go for this one. I like the obvious RSS link at the top there. I’m going to customise the header image too.

8. Widgets A widget is a menu item that appears in your sidebar. Again, Wordpress offers you a selection of widgets that you can use. Below I have selected the most common ones.

9. Select these from your list and then click “Visit site”. You will see each widget appear on your blog and see what it does. Experiment a bit with changing things around and checking how it affects your site until you get a feel for how widgets work. MAKE SURE YOU CLICK “Save Changes” BEFORE CHECKING

10. You can also change the order of your widgets by dragging and dropping them into the right order. Move them around, click “Save Changes” and have a look at how the order works on your site.

11. When you are happy with the look of your blog, the widgets you have activated and the order, click save changes. You now have a customised blog!

13. Click “Manage” You can see a list of the posts you have written here.

14. You can see basic information about your post here. You can click on the post title to reopen the post itself. This will allow you to correct any errors, update the post, add or remove categories and tags Deleting a post is easy – simply tick the box and click “delete”. You probably want to get rid of that “Hello world” one

15. Hey presto!

16. You can also amend pages. Pages allow you to create “About me” or other permanent pages. The way that the navigation of pages appears will vary from theme to theme. Amend the page in the same way as your posts – click on it, write your copy and save it.

20. Next – linking and commenting (the social bit)