WordPress is probably the most popular blogging platform in Nigeria and of course, the world. There are other popular and free blogging platforms out there like Joomla!, Blogger and Drupal, but WordPress has been able to carve a niche for itself because of its eztreme simplicity and ease of use. For those that don’t know, a blog site is a website that allow for readers’ interactions to articles published on such websites. Diary of A Geek is an example of a blog and is built on WordPress platforms.

Gone are the days when you need a little knowledge of “rocket science” to set up a blog. Nowadays, all it takes is to subscribe to a web host that offers “easy-to-install” wordpress and with just a few clicks, you are done.
You may notice some similarities among some of these sites, with some being exact replicas. What determines this similarities is the theme being used. The theme determines the website layout or colour schemes and it is about the only thing that effectively differentiates your blog from the next. Really, nobody wants his website to look like the one next door, and this is why the template or theme you use is very important.

Lately, wordpress themes are also being used extensively in full website designs and has become a platform of choice. A good example of a website design based on wordpress is www.arthurwales.com

There are lots of free templates out there, with a sizeable number provided by wordpress itself. I must warn that most of them are quite plain and unattractive. For serious minded bloggers, you should preferrably go for the premium ones as they are better featured, with just a slightly less possibility of stumbling on the design on another blog. However, free template or not, they are still chances that a thousand other blogs out there would have the same theme or look as yours. To guide against this, you have a choice of tweaking your template to further enhance or differentiate your site or better still, commission a good wordpress theme developer to produce a “one -in-a million” design for you.

I have been actively involved in wordpress theme development and would, in a few days, be putting up some of these for Free via this link . Look out.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad