Most hosting plans include a bundle of pre-install scripts in your control panel (eg. CPanel, DirectAdmin). There are several script library like Fantastico, Installatron, etc. (depends on your host provider). To make life easier, you can always install your WordPress blog via the script installer. Learn how to install WordPress using Fantastico. It’s more or less the same for other script installer.

Now you have WordPress installed, and you probably don’t want to stick to the default K2 theme, which looks so plain and not attractive. Although content is the king, first impression is also very important. What to do next? Search for your desire WordPress theme! There are plenty of free themes available. But please beware of free themes provided by less trustful source. (hacker can encrypt codes in the theme and easily access your blog.)

After you find your favorite WordPress theme (mostly come in compressed format like .zip or .rar), extract it and you will have to upload it to your host. How to do that, you wonder. It’s very easy. You can either upload the whole theme folder via your control panel but that will be kinda slow, so I highly recommend you to upload your theme (any files) via FireFTP (Yes, you need Firefox to do that).

Next, you have to navigate to the correct directory to upload your WordPress theme. First you have to look for your WordPress folder, the folder that have all your WordPress files. Normally it will be in WWW or public_html folder.

Take this as an example: www.yourdomain.com/blog

The /blog is your WordPress folder. The folder name defers, as you are the one who determine the name earlier during WordPress installation stage.

To upload your WordPress theme (the whole theme folder that you have downloaded and extracted), navigate to the following directory (in FireFTP or your control panel):

Your wordpress folder (eg: blog)/wp-content/themes

After uploading your theme, you will be able to see your uploaded theme in the “Design” tab in your WordPress admin panel. Just click on the theme you want, and you have successfully change your blog theme!

To add your sidebar, just click on the “Widgets” and have fun adding (available only for widget-ready themes).

Tip: You can use the same method to upload plugins to your host (WordPress folder).

If you have any questions regarding this topic, do not hasitate to ask in the comment section.

Why? Because you can easily customize your theme, test out plugins and other features of Wordpress, before you upload the whole thing or implement the plugins that you are going to use, to your host. You can see the result almost instantly, as localhost connection is always faster.

If you ask me how do I customize my blog theme, I will tell you that, I have a local server installed in my computer which is not open to public and I can just preview any changes I made easily without disturbing my current online blog theme.

All you need is a web server application, Apache, MySQL database and PhpMyAdmin application.  There are several open source all-in-one web server application you can choose from. I would suggest you to use WAMP or XAMPP.

For the sake of this tutorial, I would suggest you to use WAMP. To install Wordpress in your computer, you will need the following application and files:

1. WampServer 2. Wordpress release

Lifehacker has written a very good tutorial for this.  Screencasts are included for easier understanding.  Take note that the tutorial was written some time ago, so instead of using WampServer, they were using WAMP5, which is an old version.   For step 2, you can just leave the password blank (since you are the only one who will access this). In step 5, if you leave your password blank in step 2, then for DB_PASSWORD, just leave blank in between the single quotes. Just follow as closely as possible and you will have your Wordpress blog installed in your local computer within the next few minutes.

Remember, you will have to turn on WampServer in order for your http://localhost to work.

By the way, this morning, I have installed the current lastest Wordpress 2.5 release in my localhost and try it out a little.  Here are some screenshots.

The interface is indeed “cleaner”. Here is the login screen.

And this is the Dashboard which claimed to be “cleaner” too.

Now, it’s really more neat and organized in the Dashboard. You can see updates from Wordpress development team under one group.  And you can also find another group of updates on plugins. This is a good place to get you informed about any cool plugins that you can use.

I sort of dislike the “cleaner” white and orange interface.  So what I can do is, click on the “Users” on the right navigation and choose “Your Profile”. From there, I selected “Classic”.

After applying the preference, this is how my Dashboard looks like. That’s more like it.

Something nice about this new release.  Now, there’s a password strength checker.

Built-in Gravatar.   You can see corresponding Gravatar in your comment management section.

This is the reason why I want to install Wordpress in my local computer, so that if there’s any error I can test it before I upload everything to my host. Currently the Popularity Contest plugin is not compatible with Wordpress 2.5.

There are many more things to discover in Wordpress 2.5. I found that the editor interface is really a great improvement, especially the full view mode. I’ll play around with version 2.5 for a little while in my local computer before updating my Wordpress blogs in my host.