Sep | 03 | 2006

WordPress themes: A gentle introduction

Posted by Professor as Blog Tutorial, Creating a Blog, Design and Themes, Templates

If you are a WordPress user, you could definitely have a lot of fun playing around with the themes so you could change the way it looks. If you haven’t tried it, let me tell you some things about it.

Changing WordPress themes

If you have a WordPress.com account, you can choose from the different themes available. Just log in and click “My Dashboard” then when you get there, click “Presentation.” From there, you will see different themes. Just click on the image of the preview of the theme you like.

If you have WordPress on your host, you need to have FTP access to it. Choose a theme from any sources on the Internet, download it and make sure that you unzip it on your computer first. Then using your favorite FTP client (Maybe Filezilla? You can also try Fireftp, an extension for Firefox that allows you to do FTP.) Your theme files are often in your (directory with WordPress)/wp-content/themes/ directory so make sure that you completely upload the files there. Once you have your files there, you could login to your blog, go to the Dashboard, click “Presentation” and activate the theme of your choice. You could upload all the themes that you like so that you have a lot to choose from.

Modifying your chosen WordPress theme

Once you have chosen a theme, you could make some changes on it via the Theme Editor. If your theme files have settings that allow you to overwrite them, that is. In any case, you have to be familiar with CSS so that you could make some customizations. This is especially if you want to change the color of your blog. But in case you want to add some stuff on your sidebar or maybe change how your sidebar looks like, at least the order of the sections on it, you could easily do that with WordPress widgets. WordPress widgets allow you to move those elements in your sidebar while you are logged in and managing things from your Dashboard. You must make sure that you have the widgets plugin so that this is possible.

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