How I Accidentally Slept Through New Year's Eve...

Yep. In the great tradition of nerdiness that saw me spend last year's NYE alone, Googling weeds for my novel, I've stuffed it up again. See I'm not a drinker... so when I started getting ready by blasting dance music and hitting up the Contreau (or contrae, as I drunkenly spelled it on Facebook, cringe) I ended up having too much, fell asleep at 9:00 pm, and missed the whole thing altogether.

No need to tell me how cool I am. :P

Anyway, next day I woke, stupidly well-rested and fresh as a daisy, and by 8:00 am I was already working on a new year plan: moving to wordpress. Everyone's been saying it. I've been ignoring it, confident that content matters above a fancy wordpress logo anyway. But when I decided to give it a go I realized it's not as hard as I thought. Oh, and the features are amazing...

So over the next few days/week I'm going to post some of the tips and tricks I found through trial and error while completing the move. Plus I'll scour the internet, far and wide, for whatever other useful Wordpress goodies I can scoop up. I'll post them on the new site (which I'm still perfecting but is pretty much ready to go), and I'll post the links here on this blog. Or you could head to the new blog and follow that too, which would make me happier than a dork with her Contreau. :) 

Here it is, complete with a new and much more grown up header image - what do you think? http://beyondthehourglassbridge.wordpress.com/

And here’s my first bit of 'advice'. Enjoy!

Choosing A Wordpress Theme

It’s always important to have a good idea of what you want from your blog before you start, but with Wordpress I think that’s even more important, since it’s more complicated and it’ll probably take longer to work your head around the customizations available. You don’t want to suddenly find that the theme you’ve chosen doesn’t support the feature you need.

What I wanted most was a customizable header image, customizable menu, and a nice, serif font (serifs are the little kicks you get on the corners of letters in fonts like Times New Roman), rather than some new age text which would clash with the historical feel of my blog.

And do you think I could get all three?

Yes… with compromises, and only after about two year’s worth of searching.

So to save you some time, the first thing I’d recommend is Googling the support for what you’re after. e.g. “customize header image wordpress” leads you to this nifty list of themes which allow you to create your own header image: http://en.support.wordpress.com/themes/custom-header-image/

Do the same for the other features you’re after and have them all open at the same time, along with the list of available themes, and you’ll be able to cross-check as you go, rather than having to load the details of every single theme until you go slightly cross-eyed and start thinking the walls are talking to you.