Tips For Selecting and Installing a Theme in WordPress

While there’s nothing wrong with the stock themes that come with the initial download of WordPress, they are rather plain and generic by most standards.  If you decide to use one of them, your site is are going to look like all the other blogs that utilize the same theme.

The thing is, you don’t have to settle for the ones supplied by the blogging platform.  There are literally 10s of thousands of free themes out there that you can download use freely – save for a small link in the footer pointing back to the site you downloaded the free theme from.  A simple Google search for the phrase ‘Free WordPress Themes’ or some variation of that will lead you to dozens of sites, all with high quality, attractive themes that are free to use.

When searching for a theme, it’s important to consider the theme from a structural standpoint. What you want to avoid is choosing a theme that you will have to make wholesale changes to in order to get the look you want.  In other words, things like background colors, text colors, fonts and sizes, header graphics and other various aesthetic aspects of the theme can be modified to your tastes with relatively little effort (provided you have a basic understanding of CSS and HTML coding).  The idea is to pick a theme based on how if will function according to what you’re intentions are.  For example, if you are planning on having a series of paid ads on your blog, you should choose a theme that is set up to accommodate that rather easily.  If simplicity is the way you’re looking to go, a basic single column theme would probably suffice.

After you’ve selected and downloaded the theme you’re going to use, you need to install it on your blog.  Do do this, go into the file manager in your control panel and open the ‘themes’ folder in the ‘WordPress_Content’ subfolder .  Then choose ‘upload’ from the top navigation bar and upload the file.

After the theme .zip file has been uploaded to your file manager, click ‘refresh’ on the file manager.  The file you just uploaded should no appear in the folder.  Find the theme you just uploaded and click the checkbox next to it.  Now click ‘extract’ at the top and answer OK to the popups.

When that is finished, go back into the installed themes page of your WordPress Dashboard.  The theme you just installed should appear along with the ones that came original with WordPress.  Activate the theme and you’re done!!