How to setup your Ghost publication
We've crammed the most important information into this post to help you set up your new publication.
Welcome to your brand new Ghost publication!
Unlike social networks, this one is all yours. From here, you can publish your work on a custom domain, invite your audience to subscribe, send them new content by email newsletter, and offer premium subscriptions to generate sustainable recurring revenue to fund your work.
Ghost is an independent, open source app, which means you can customize absolutely everything. Inside the admin area, you'll find straightforward controls for changing themes, colors, navigation, logos, and settings — so you can set your site up just how you like it. No technical knowledge required.
For now, you're probably wondering what to do first to transform your site into something with a custom brand, style, and personality.
Design settings
The best way to get started is with Ghost's Design settings, where you can set up a description, accent color, background image, and logo to suit your brand.
When selecting an accent color, try to choose something that will contrast nicely with white text. Many themes will use your accent color as the background for buttons, headers, and navigational elements. Vibrant colors with a darker hue tend to work best, as a general rule.
Installing Ghost themes
By default, new sites are created with Ghost's friendly publication theme, Source. Everything in Source is optimized to work for the most common types of blogs, newsletters, and publications that people create with Ghost — so it's a perfect place to start.
However, there are hundreds of different themes available to install, so you can pick out a look and feel that suits you best. You can start with a number of free Official themes, which can be browsed and installed directly from the Design settings page:
Each theme is suited to slightly different use cases:
- Source (default) — Made for all sorts of blogs and newsletters
- Digest — A beautiful minimal template for newsletter authors
- Alto — A slick news/magazine-style design for creators
- London — A light photography theme with a bold grid
- Ease — A library theme for organizing large content archives
If none of those feel quite right, head on over to the theme marketplace, where you'll find a handpicked list of the best premium themes that have been built by third-party developers. To purchase and download a premium theme, click the Buy button and follow the instructions.
The main thing to remember at this stage: Just get started.
You can always tweak these settings or choose a new theme anytime. The most important thing to do right now is to launch something and start creating. So, let's move on to the next topic — How to publish your first post.
