We are not arguing that some free themes of wordpress.com are professional and others are not professional. But when you think about a website or blog, you have some set of ideas to determine a website that is professional. You will be definitely comparing yours with leading news or magazine website layouts, at this point of time.
Please note that, this post is for those who wants a personal blog website. This post doesn’t address any themes for commercial websites. Such will be discussed in a different post.
We recommend a computer to do this job. Not your smartphone.
Step 1
Open admin pannel
Go to your website. For eg: https://postboardhome.wordpress.com
Click on My site (at top left corner of your screen).

The admin panel will be displayed.
Step 2
Select theme
Click on Themes from the dark panel on left hand side.
Now lots of themes displays before you.
Step 3
Choosing the right theme
This is the moment for getting confused. As yours is a personal blog website, your priority should be to,
- Indexing your writings or blogs beautifully on screen
- Easy and quick access to your blogs, pictures, other site pages
- Altogether it should have a layout of a typical magazine website.
These elements are your stepping stones towards professionalism.
The features essential for the theme to make it look like a magazine website is,
- A two or three column layout for your blog posts indexed on homepage.
- A right or left sided widget on homepage, to display social network buttons, recent posts, recent comments, top posts, followers, statistics, etc.
Themes you see now on your screen, doesn’t have these features. So scroll down the page and click on See all themes.
Step 4
Choose free themes
You will be seeing a lot of cool themes, which are paid and free. Now you need to filter only free themes out of it. Click on Free.
Step 5
Choose a magazine styled theme.
Now you have all free advanced themes in front of you.
The themes we prefer are,
1. Apostrophe 2
This our current theme for Postboard.in
Features are,
- 3 row layout to display posts on homepage
- Customisable widget area on right hand side.
- Clean design.
2. Rowling
This was our previous theme for Postboard.in
Features are,
- 2 row layout to display posts on homepage
- Customisable widget area on left hand side
- Clean and beautiful design
If you find any other themes best for your blog, go for it. Its your decisions that matter for your site. We appreciate your decision and are happy to help.
Step 6
Activate the selected theme
Click on your preferred theme and click Activate.
That’s it. You have your professional graded magazine theme.
Next step is to customise your theme, which will be discussed in a different post.
Thank you.