WordPress Themes – Making Your Blog Look Good

Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 3:49 pm

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It’s all very well having a good content on your blog and great plugins doing work for you but if this is the place where people are going to come to read about you, then you certainly don’t want it looking unprofessional or amateurish.

To fix this you need to change your blogs theme. At this point most people will take the simple route and go to search among the many free WordPress themes that are available. For the majority of people just getting started, this is probably the best thing to do, especially if you’re working on a budget.

However, if you’re anything like me, you’ll be quite picky and want your blog to look a certain way with a certain colour scheme etc. In this case, you have a few options;

You understand HTML, PHP and CSS and therefore will be able to modify a theme to get it looking exactly the way you want it.
You’re willing to hire someone to design your blog theme for you.
You make a one time payment and purchase the Thesis Theme. With this theme, you can get your blog laid out exactly how you want it without having to know any coding at all. You select the relevant options and this theme automatically does all the coding for you. Its design also has built in optimised SEO, so that’s one less thing for you to worry about.

If you purchase a theme or download one from somewhere other than within your WordPress Dashboard then you will have to upload the theme into your domains WordPress Theme folder using an FTP client (I recommend FileZilla. It’s free!).
Once you have done this, see the activating your theme section below.

Finding Your WordPress Theme

If you decide to get one of the free themes directly from WordPress then you will need to do the following;

Once you’re logged in, click on the button in the left hand menu that says ‘Appearance’.

This will open a drop down giving you a few more options. Click on ‘Add New Themes’.

You will now be presented with a screen that contains a few choices you can make with regards to your theme. Select the options you want and then click on ‘Find Themes’.

WordPress will display screenshots of all the themes that match your search criteria.

Select the theme that you think looks best and click on ‘Install’.

This will download the theme into your WordPress Theme directory.

Activating Your Theme

Next, you will want to activate the theme so that it is live on your blog.

Under the ‘Appearance’ option in the left hand menu, click on the ‘Themes’ link.

You will now see screenshots of all the themes that are stored on your server. Find the theme that you have just installed and click on the link that says ‘Activate’.

That’s it, this new theme is now live on your blog.

Open a new browser window and load your URL to check that it has loaded successfully.

Your blog should now look a lot more appealing.

If you have followed all my posts on ‘Getting Started‘ and put the info into action then you will now have your own hosting, your own domain name, a great looking blog with good content and traffic pulling plugins. Not bad going so far!

Next I’ll post about some traffic generation methods.

As always, I appreciate any feedback via the comments section below. Questions, suggestions, criticism. Anything that can help me to help you!

Cheers

Pete

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