Written by Without Themes your WordPress site is basicly a blank screen. They are what you build your site around and they are the foundation and template of what your site is going to look like. So understanding the correct use of themes is probably the most important thing you can learn when it comes to making your WordPress experience the best one possible.
Choosing The Correct Theme
Everyone who installs WordPress (WP) is given the same looking standard theme ( Default theme).
All fairly standard and of course nothing how you want your blog to look. What we need to do here is really the very first thing you should do when starting your WP site and that is choose a theme that will reflect what your going to do with it.
So first think about how you want it to look and what its going to achieve.
- Are you looking to make money from your WordPress site, if so then consider a theme that has spaces for advertising such as banners or Google Adsense.
- Will it be for showcasing your talent for photography, then choose one that is set up to do just this.
- How about going old school and using your site as it was originally intended, that is to write regular articles in a way that people can read without any distractions, then decide on a very simple no thrills theme that allows the writing to do the talking.
- Perhaps your going to promote your business with it then in that case a theme that allows you to put a lot of information on the one page without readers having to scroll too far down the page. For this a theme with several columns will do.
- You might want a theme that has a header image (the very top part of your site) that reflects what you are doing.
Can you see how important it it to do a bit of thinking before you decide on a style. You might as well get it right first time rather than 3 months down the road ,having said that its no great disaster switching themes at a later date you just may have to do a bit of tidying up and moving things around when you do switch from one to the other.
Finding Your Theme
Ok so you know what your looking for, what now. Well first go to your WP admin panel and scroll down the dashboard on the left until you hit “Appearance” click on this. The page you are now on should being giving you a description of your current theme that you are using.
Now to get a new theme simply hit the tab at the top that says “Install Themes”. You are now confronted on this page with two choices.
- Type into the small search box a word or words (keywords) that would best describe what you want your blog to look like, eg: Photography or advertising etc and see what comes up. If you know the name of a particular theme then type it in here.
- Refine your search and use the “Feature Filter” lower down the page. Its quite self explanatory this one, just tick the boxes that you would like to see in your theme then click at the bottom “find themes”.
NB: Don’t tick too many boxes as your only narrow down the search too much and probably nothing will be found. Leave it a little room for manoeuvre. You can always change your search criteria a second time round.
Installing A Theme
Now assuming your search results have come up with something (if not try again) you should be looking at a few choices of themes all close to what you asked for and hopefully some that are exactly what your looking for.
Lets assume there is one you like. To install this as your theme in place of the default one you simple hit the install link under the theme picture, you will then be asked to “install now” in a seperate box..
On the next page hit the “Activate” link and et voila you have a new sparkly style to your WordPress.
What If You Still Cant Find A Style You Like
Don’t worry your WP admin panel does not hold all the themes there are, there are many more to be found in Google land.
Type into google search box any relevant keywords such as Free WordPress photography themes or Free Simple WordPress themes etc and see what you search brings about.
NB: Within the confines of the WP admin panel all the themes are free but out in the big bad world you are going to find themes (premium themes) that people want paying for.
There is nothing wrong with this, they are not ripping you off. They are providing a service of designing themes and want paying for it. And if you were a seasoned WordPresser who has experience under his belt then I would say have a look because some of these themes can be very advanced indeed. But for now stick to the free ones, there all I ever use and to be honest unless you have a very specific thing you want to do with your blog you don’t need a premium one and there are just thousands of free ones out there..
Installing A Theme From The Internet (Google/Yahoo)
When you do find one you like there will be a download tab that needs clicking. You are going to download it to your computer in order for you to upload it to your WP admin panel (very simple believe me)
Now remember where your downloading it to on your computer. I tend to create a separate file on my desktop just for this purpose so to keep things nice and clean. To create a special file simply go to your computers home page (Desk Top), the one where you see all the icons when you start your computer. Now right click your mouse then click on New then click on Folder at the top. Rename it something your remember, you have now created a new folder.
So download the theme and choose to store it (save) into your new folder, once this is done go to your WordPress admin panel/Dashboard, go to “Appearence” on the left hand column and click. Hit “Install themes” as you have done before and then click on the link at the top that says “upload”.
Here you will hit the browse button to search for the file you saved the theme in. Double click on the link in this file. You should now see this in the browse box of your admin panel, click install now and then activate. There we are done.
You are now ready to start building your WordPress site, you have your new theme and you understand the correct use of themes. Now start learning How to Post and Edit Articles
If you liked this article and think it will help others then please use the Twitter or Facebook buttons found on this page to share this article with your friends, thank you, Nick
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