It is overwhelming when you have little experience and don't yet know much about the different breeds! We used several of the "chicken breed selector" tools online (there's one on BYC, and one on mypetchicen.com which is where we ordered our chicks from) and looked for traits that we wanted in our chickens (good layers, large or medium sized eggs, lack of broodiness, cold hardy, and calm and friendly). That helped to narrow it down a little, then from the still too large list we got that way we picked the breeds we thought were prettiest. After all, there are many breeds that fit our needs, so why not pick one that appealed to us visually as well? When all the other more important factors are equal, choosing based on aesthetics works just as well as any other criteria. We also asked questions here about breeds we were interested in. People here will always be happy to tell you what their favorite breed or breeds are! Then we looked at the breeds that the sight we were ordering from had available and chose the ones that had hatch dates at the same time (for example, I would have liked to get the columbian wyandottes too but they weren't available at the same ship date as some of the other breeds we had chosen).
