No More Boring Blog Templates For Your WordPress Blog
Perhaps the hardest part of WordPress to grasp for new users is that there's no set "look" to the site it creates - the content and design are completely separated, so the entire theme can be changed within one or two clicks.
This is alien to anyone who's been through web design, where usually the appearance is hard-coded in the HTML and difficult to change.
The theme acts as a skin, determining where individual page elements such as menus, posts and pages are placed, which colors and fonts are used, column layouts, background graphics and anything else on the page.
The standard themes that are packaged with a WordPress installation work fine but you've probably seen the same themes used on many different sites.
Additionally, these tend to focus on the blogging function of WordPress, while other themes create more of a 'magazine' or business feel to the site.
Fortunately, adding additional themes is easy.
If you're running WordPress 3.
0, log into the administrator page of your site (usually located mysite.
com/wp-admin), click on Appearance and then select Themes.
Here you can see the themes installed on your server, and the currently selected theme.
Clicking Preview on any available theme will show a rendering of your site using the new layout - but without changing anything on the live website.
There are several ways to find new themes - by clicking Install Themes on the top tab menu, you can search for one of 1,219 themes available on WordPress.
org, absolutely free.
These are tagged by style to help search through the list.
But you're not just limited to the themes on WordPress.
org.
With literally thousands of custom WordPress themes, a simple Google search for "free WordPress themes" yields several hundred websites with a wide variety of designs.
Once you find a design you'd like to use, download the theme's ZIP file (where all the core theme customizations are stored) and return to your site's WordPress administration.
Under the Install Themes option, click Upload and select the ZIP file to install the theme on your server.
This normally takes just a few seconds, and once again you can preview the theme to see if it suits your site.
There are also sites offering premium WordPress themes, which tend to provide more customization and complexity than their free counterparts.
One of the most well known is called WooThemes, though there are many companies producing work of a similar quality.
The main benefit in using a theme as a starting point is that it's relatively easy to change the HTML or CSS to tailor the look to your exact needs.
Additionally, since many themes have been tested for CSS validation, a theme can be the fast track to creating a site that both looks professional and will work identically across all modern browsers.
WordPress themes offer an easy way to make your site distinctive, and adding customization can be used to make it yours.
Always check the licensing of the theme you use: while some are GPL (essentially open source), others may be more restrictive in terms of the number of sites you can create, or whether credits must remain in the footer.
This is alien to anyone who's been through web design, where usually the appearance is hard-coded in the HTML and difficult to change.
The theme acts as a skin, determining where individual page elements such as menus, posts and pages are placed, which colors and fonts are used, column layouts, background graphics and anything else on the page.
The standard themes that are packaged with a WordPress installation work fine but you've probably seen the same themes used on many different sites.
Additionally, these tend to focus on the blogging function of WordPress, while other themes create more of a 'magazine' or business feel to the site.
Fortunately, adding additional themes is easy.
If you're running WordPress 3.
0, log into the administrator page of your site (usually located mysite.
com/wp-admin), click on Appearance and then select Themes.
Here you can see the themes installed on your server, and the currently selected theme.
Clicking Preview on any available theme will show a rendering of your site using the new layout - but without changing anything on the live website.
There are several ways to find new themes - by clicking Install Themes on the top tab menu, you can search for one of 1,219 themes available on WordPress.
org, absolutely free.
These are tagged by style to help search through the list.
But you're not just limited to the themes on WordPress.
org.
With literally thousands of custom WordPress themes, a simple Google search for "free WordPress themes" yields several hundred websites with a wide variety of designs.
Once you find a design you'd like to use, download the theme's ZIP file (where all the core theme customizations are stored) and return to your site's WordPress administration.
Under the Install Themes option, click Upload and select the ZIP file to install the theme on your server.
This normally takes just a few seconds, and once again you can preview the theme to see if it suits your site.
There are also sites offering premium WordPress themes, which tend to provide more customization and complexity than their free counterparts.
One of the most well known is called WooThemes, though there are many companies producing work of a similar quality.
The main benefit in using a theme as a starting point is that it's relatively easy to change the HTML or CSS to tailor the look to your exact needs.
Additionally, since many themes have been tested for CSS validation, a theme can be the fast track to creating a site that both looks professional and will work identically across all modern browsers.
WordPress themes offer an easy way to make your site distinctive, and adding customization can be used to make it yours.
Always check the licensing of the theme you use: while some are GPL (essentially open source), others may be more restrictive in terms of the number of sites you can create, or whether credits must remain in the footer.
Source...