Background information.

Anyone can choose a theme, change the title of their site or their profile photo. Those things require no special expertise (apart from maybe photo editing).

Using your own domain name requires either knowing how to change DNS records or getting the domain registrar's Helpdesk to make the change for you.

Adding a footer is easy, but the results will almost certainly be disappointing unless you understand how to make that footer look good with HTML and CSS (Huh? Read on.).

Adding a favicon can be done if you follow instructions very carefully.

All of those things are relatively simple to do. From here on out though, you'll need to do some learning. Don't worry, I have tutorials (and the experience of helping hundreds of beginners to learn this stuff) that will give you the foundation to make changes such as:

  • Change the colour of certain bits of text, for example links.
  • Make images stand out more.
  • Use a header image.

For those kinds of changes, even if you ask for help (or especially if you ask for help), you'll need to know a little about the hidden coding that makes web pages work. That coding is called HTML and CSS. I'll explain below what those names mean and why you should learn a bit about them. I'll also explain how at the most basic level both are quite straightforward.

If you want to get really fancy and completely customise everything about your blog then you'll need to know HTML and CSS for sure, and also other things I'll get to later. So let's start at the beginning with HTML, also known as Hypertext Markup Language. It's not hard.