Making wordpress your own - Theme 1
When getting started with wordpress there are a couple of technical steps you need to do first, but when it comes to making it feel like your own changing away from the default theme is Priority 1.
Personally I think the default wordpress theme is such a horrible starting point that everyone should change to something better straight away. (Even if they plan to highly customise their blog or are just using it as a test/study of wordpress.)
What you change to can be a very basic and simple layout - in fact, a simple layout is probably the best if you want to see how wordpress works so you can make your own changes.
So what should your ‘theme-1′ be? - Well I’ve got two suggestions… and both are free.
ProSense
Prosense, created by Dosh Dosh and The Wrong Advices, is the theme I’m currently using on this site. It is a highly optimised theme for Google Adsense Placement and is widget ready.
However it retains the ‘blog style’ and itsn’t really suited for anything other than adsense. [While you could place one skyscraper banner into the adsense place, you need to be very confident on your 'conversions' if you plan to just use 1 prominent advert.]
Rebel Magazine
If, however, you are looking to take your wordpress installation away from the traditional blog style layout, while at the same time retaining the highly effective dark-background light-content-area styling I can recommend you checkout the free Rebel Magazine theme from wpthemedesigner.
With most blogs featuring a slowly building collection of what become highly popular posts amidst their general background noise there is a strong case now for putting a magazine-style front page (with the top posts) on your otherwise linear blog.
Looking at the demo, you’ll notice when it comes to advertising, Rebel Magazine theme offers a ‘quad’ of 125px squares.
These are without doubt the best converting ads working today. Small enough to demand close attention, yet also not getting in peoples way they allow you to offer a variety of ads (say wp-themes, hosting, software, etc) which increase the chances of getting diverse visitors to click through.
Please change from Kubrick
The wordpress default theme Kubrick was a revolution when it was released. However by putting every blog into this header-heavy theme by default it not only scares off many a potential wordpress user but also under demonstrates Wordpress as a CMS.
How many times have you arrived on a site, seen the kubrick theme, and then immediatly started looking for an excuse to leave?
Both of the examples above are more compact and give you more room to do your own thing.
