wordpress themes

One of the great things about using WordPress is the abundance of the ready made themes you can choose from. Everything from the basic blog layouts right up to very sophisticated designs that offer full ecommerce solutions. Not only versatile in appearance but also cost effective as you can choose from many free themes that you can customize to suit your needs or you can buy them at every price range.

Regardless of the type of theme you go with there will be a lot of similarities governing how the themes are laid out, how the various options work and what will be expected of you in setting up your new theme.

Within the Dashboard, the administration area for your WordPress installation, you will be looking for the Appearance Tab where you will find the subsections of Themes, Customize and usually a tab called Theme options. There will be a few other tabs to help run your site but for this post we are mainly dealing with themes.

The WordPress theme tab is where you would select your Theme and install/activate your theme. Opening this tab will display any pre-loaded themes and let you Live Preview them prior to activating your theme. Simply hover your cursor over a Theme and options such as Preview and Activate will display. Also if you do not like any of the Themes on display you could click on Add New at the top of the screen and select others to download.

Upon clicking Add New you will be presented with a screen that offers the following options;

  • Featured
  • Popular
  • Latest
  • Upload Theme

Featured is just that the Featured Themes available for installation from WordPress.com and they are generally free, well the light version is anyway. You may have noticed a number preceding the word Featured and that is the number of themes available in this option.

Popular represents the most popular Themes available for you to use. Once again the preceding number represents the number currently available in this category. Generally these themes are free as well but a good number of them will offer a light, free version.

Latest offers the most recently uploaded Themes to WordPress.com and just like in the 2 examples above, they are free and proceeded by the number available for installation.

To use any of the Themes from the categories listed above simply hover the cursor over the Theme you are interested in and you will be able to click on Details & Preview or Install. To do any of these just click on the option you are interested in. Keep in mind that if you install a Theme and then change your mind you can just change it at any time.

If you do not see anything you like in those options you can always Upload Theme by clicking that button. Should you choose to do so you will be taken to a new window where you will be able to browse your computer files by clicking on the Choose File button to find your downloaded Theme. Once you have chosen the theme file, keep in mind that the theme file MUST be a zipped file, click on the Install Now button. Could it get any easier?

There are a few things that you need to be careful about when using Free WordPress Themes; sometimes the developer will embed links within the footer that you can not deactivate without paying a premium price. If you know how to code you might be able to deactivate them yourself but in doing so you violate the terms of use and or the theme stops working.

Another thing to watch out for is designers using images that they do not hold the rights to. In this case you are the one who will be responsible for their use and not the Theme creator so you really should obtain the rights to any graphics that are used within your new theme.

Depending upon the Theme you have chosen there will be 1 or 2 other tabs within the Appearance section that may need some attention; Customize and possibly Theme options.

Customize allows for you to edit various things like Titles and Descriptions, Design, Static Front Page to name but a few. This area can have a lot of variations, far too many for me to name here but they are pretty straightforward and editing these options come with a preview prior to activating them.

The other is Theme options and once again there could be a lot of variables here that come with more advanced themes that offer a great many customizable options. Once again the variables here are too vast to name here and not necessarily standard to all wordpress themes.

There are also a few other options under the Appearance Tab such as Widgets and Menus and while those are fairly standard elements for all themes they may or may not be used on the theme you have chosen so I won’t go into them in this post.

The following two tabs change content below.
Search Engines are now one of the biggest lead generators for any online company, and Les Romhanyi is passionate about Google and Bing and everything ‘SERP.’ Truly an SEO expert in organic search optimization, Les has optimized websites for search engines before it was even called Search Engine Optimization, going back to 1995 while working on the Net Sheppard project. In the nearly two decades since, Les has provided SEO services to some of the most competitive and difficult business verticals, such as online gambling, pharmaceuticals, and real estate.