On any given day you can do a Google search for “wordpress themes” and get almost 4 million results. A search for “free wordpress themes” will yield about a million results. Most of these results provide multiple options, including single-column, two-column, three-column and four- column themes. You can also choose widget-ready, seo-optimized and adsense-ready themes.

Since I started blogging, I have spent countless hours prowling the web for just the right WordPress theme. I’ve been fairly successful at finding free themes for my sites. But recently, I noticed that several bloggers have moved to customized themes, often paying a few hundred dollars and upwards to distinguish the look of their blog.

Being on a budget, I initially felt the custom designs were much ado about nothing. After all, and eye-catching theme is nice, but content is King. Absent quality content, the best designs in the world are of little consequence. However, given the ever-growing popularity of WordPress, it is not unusual to come across the same theme on several different sites.

If you’ve read my “About” page, you’ll know that I had my first site up in 2000. And it was highly customized both in design and cost. Since the site didn’t accomplish most of my goals, beyond look, I became a bit custom adverse. But, I needed to give this site (http://intenzathletix.com) a makeover that would allow me to quickly and easily manage content as well as monetize the site. I also needed a theme that related to youth sports and/or physical fitness. Although I found a handful of free candidates, they just didn’t fit the look I was after.

Enter the Revolution by Brian Gardner, a premium news theme. In a word, FANTABULOUS. Already familiar with Brian’s free WordPress themes, the Revolution series was icing on the cake. At a cost of $79.95, these themes are competitively priced (well within reason). They come widget-ready, customizable and compatible with WordPress 2.3.2+.

So I bit the bullet and purchased the Revolution Tech theme. The download of the theme and the included plug-ins was fairly painless. The support forum and tutorials walked me through customization of the theme. In fact, the support forum has been particularly useful in providing recommendations on site design. Brian is often on the forum answering questions himself.

Another unique benefit of being a part of the Revolution is the Revolution showcase. The showcase includes several examples of how other bloggers are customizing the various themes. Creativity is only limited by one’s imagination with the Revolution theme.

Thus, To Premium is the answer to the question. The level of flexibility and support is well worth its weight in gold.

If you haven’t considered the Revolution themes, check them out here today. It’s doubtful that you will be disappointed.

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After about a month and a half of no activity on this blog, I’m finally back. The 30 Day Challenge is over and I am still working on generating my first $10.

Why the lack of activity?

Initially, my entire site disappeared for the second time in two months. After multiple phone calls and trouble tickets, it took technical support about two weeks to get the site back up. I was then off to the World Internet Marketing Event. Upon my return, I decided to switch web hosts (the detail of which I will discuss in a separate post). After some research and user opinions, I chose Hostgator. And the transfer process began.

What should have been a simple migration was complicated yet again because it took a week for the geniuses at my then existing web host to give me the information to change my name servers. Once I secured the relevant information, Hostgator completed the transfer. But they initially transferred the wrong site as I had two with the prior web host. However, they made the correction rather quickly.

Next, I needed to upgrade from WordPress 2.0 to WordPress 2.2. After about a week, I accomplished that task and here we are. I still need to reinstall a few plugins and generally get the site back to its original structure and design. Hostgator’s technical support has been a marked improvement in the quality of service and response time. So within the next few days, I should be back in total, picking up where I left off.

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I started playing around in the WordPress admin interface and was able to see a few templates I uploaded and discover how to create the basics, i.e., posts, categories, links and pages. Now I must admit, what appeared beyond what I consider the “basics” began to get a bit confusing. So I resorted to the handy google toolbar in search of a WordPress tutorial. To my delight, the first link listed, Easy Web Tutorials, provided exactly what I needed. The tutorials are video based, short, sweet and straight to the point. I’m starting to tinker a bit with html code to change headers and content on the sidebars. Next stop: blog submission.

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WoW, what a ride…. As you can tell by the title of my blog, I am not the brightest bulb on the tree or the sharpest tool in the shed, but after three whole days I finally got this blog setup. And what a feat it was. I called technical support not less than 10 times, spent countless hours looking for the perfect template (and I’m sure I missed a site), and had at least seven false starts trying to upload wordpress through my control panel and dreamweaver. But it is done. Now, if I can figure out how to add posts, plugins, widgets, rss feeds and all the other fancy things people add to their blog, I will surely have some entertaining experiences to share.For those who are as technically challenged as I am, here are some suggestions to avoid a lot of frustration when setting up your first blog:

1. After you purchase a domain name, it really does take 24-48 hours before you can start uploading to your site.
2. If your web hosting provider has a one step process to add wordpress to your site, USE IT.
3. If after you add wordpress to your site and it doesn’t work like magic (and yes I expected it to) call technical support. I could have saved half a day, if I just picked up the phone. Come to find out, there were some settings on my account that technical support needed to change for wordpress to activate on my site that took less than five minutes.
4. If the technical support staff starts to recognize your voice when you call in and you hear snickering in the background, don’t be discouraged. Just get it over with and tell them what you need them to troubleshoot next. I must admit that I got a bit concerned when I initially called in and was on line with a technical support person within 15 minutes. After about the third call, which requires me to punch in my customer identification number, the hold times got longer and longer. But I persevered and waited up to 40 minutes for a two minute fix.
5. Before you start typing your first post and before you hit save, make sure you are under “write post” and not comments.

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