Since I’ve started My slow world 1,5 years ago, I’ve learnt a lot about blogging, WordPress, online marketing and so on. But when I started, I was truly clueless. Therefore I’d love to share my experience about how to start a simple blog with a WordPress theme.

What do you need first?

Of course you need a topic, or idea, something that really excites you and that you’d love to share your knowledge on. For me this was slow living, sustainability and fashion. Yours could be DIY, cooking, psychology or whatsoever. Whatever your profession is, it can be anything!

Next steps

To get a website, you need the following things: a domain name, a host, a theme and content.

A domain name is the URL you always see on websites. For me this was my brand name and I’m happy it was still available. I also needed a host, which is a platform that will assure my website will be live. Then I needed a theme, which is a template on which I can build my website.

Which themes not to choose?

When I’ve started my blog, I didn’t know where to find good and trustable WordPress themes, which then led me to the wrong choice. I got contacted by a women, who said to be Emily from Pipdig. She suggested to build a website for me. Everything looked very trustworthy and I decided to give it a go. At that time my website was still pretty empty, so it didn’t feel like I could “lose” anything. Also I didn’t give her my passwords, so I thought “What can go wrong?”.

Well, that gut feeling I had, was right in the end. After a couple of months, a scandal popped up. And the scandal was about Pipdig, the company who said to build WordPress themes for bloggers.

Whitney writes on Whit Wanders “Pipdig was accused of adding code to the plugin to be able to: change the password of any site user, a remote kill function to delete the full contents of the website, disabled Bluehost caching, and even some code that appeared to attack a competitor of Pipdig.”

Well, obviously I had to save my work and blog from malicious practices, so I reached out to WordPress and later on Wordfence. Wordfence is a program by WordPress, that dives into all kinds of security topics and that gives advise to people in need.

Wordfence wrote a complete article about every malicious act made by Pipdig. The full article can be found here. If you do have a Pipdig theme yourself, or if you’re not quite sure, but think you do, I highly recommend reading the article.

When I reached out to Wordfence, they strongly recommended me to switch to another theme. I asked them, which ones I could trust, as I lost all my trust in the themes. Wordfence said that all themes that have been approved by WordPress itself, are safe. So if you go to your settings, look for themes under ‘appearances’ and and look for Pipdig themes, you can’t find them. You can’t find pipdig themes in the WordPress lists, as they’re not approved. However, all the other themes you see are safe.

So what themes are good?

In WordPress you can find hundreds of themes, so how can we find out which themes are good and suitable to start your own blog? It took me quite some time to find what I needed.

I really liked the Pipdig designs, when I was using them, so I wanted something similar, yet better. After some trial and errors, I found my perfect theme. The theme I’m using now is on by Blossom Themes. They are my absolute favourite. My website is now online with Blossom Themes since last spring, and I’m more than happy with how it works and looks. 

I’m using their “Fashion Lifestyle” theme, as the features are the exact ones I was looking for in a theme. The style is also very minimal and modern, the  theme is compatible with Woocommerce. Besides that, I love the possibility to enable a featured content area and the Instagram footer. If you want to read more about my experiences with Blossom Themes, I’d suggest reading this interview.

Last step

So when you found yourself a trustable theme, you can now start blogging. Edit and customise your theme the way you like it and start creating content. Make sure your content is plagiarism free, original and honest. Just be yourself, you’re good enough 🙂

I hope you found this article somewhat useful. If you have any questions left on how to start your own blog or WordPress themes, please let me know! You can reach out to me on alexandra@myslowworld.com. Thank you!