Picking Your WordPress Theme

Did you know you can change the theme of your WordPress blog?  Did you know that it is like super duper easy?  A click of the button and you’re done.  New theme!

Not that the default theme is like totally ugly or anything.  I mean someone did put some time into making it but ain’t it down right awful?  In this blog post I want to show you how to change your WordPress theme so it can reflect your style and give your blog that kinda magical thing.

First you will want to log into your WordPress admin area and look on the left hand side for Appearance.  Once you have found it, click the Appearance button and you will notice three links that drop below it.  This should default you to viewing the Themes section.  If not, you want to click on the Themes link as seen in the screen capture below.

This will bring up the Themes section of your WordPress blog.  For a newly installed blog you should have maybe two.  I think most come with the default theme and the WordPress classic theme.  Not that these themes suck or anything but there is just so much more out there.

This is where you can give your blog that visual identity that does not look like everyone else’s blog.  Enough said about that.  I think you know how important it is to change your blogs theme.

At the bottom of the page you will see a link for the WordPress Theme Directory.  You want to click on this link.

You will notice that you have navigated away from your blog and your now at the wordpress site.  This is where you can find a ton of cool themes both new and old.  I am going to walk you through the process of downloading and installing your theme.  Once you do this with me, you can go back and do it again but faster and with a theme you think is really cool.

Here we go…

I am picking the first theme that comes up on the wordpress site.  You want to click the download link to grab the theme from the site.

You can either save this file to your computer or you can open it with a zip application such as WinRAR or WinZip.  I prefer to save to the computer.  You want to make sure to note the name of the zip file you are downloading.  This is important so you can find it on your computer.

The file will get saved on your desktop.  You will want to move it to a location that will be easier to find in the future.  Let me talk about this for a second.

Lets say I have a blog site called mysimplewidgets.com.  On my computer, I create the following folder structure…MyDocuments\webprojects\mysimplewidgets.com

You can see I have a folder in MyDocuments called webprojects and under that webprojects folder I have another folder called mysimplewidgets.com.  This helps me to remember where everything is located for that specific website.  It really helps when you have 5, 7, 13, 50…websites.

The next thing I do is mirror the wordpress directory structure by pulling all the files from my wordpress install over to my new mysimplewidgets.com folder on my local computer.

Now you want to extract the theme zip file into the directory

webprojects/mysimplewidgets.com/wp-content/themes/

Now you can go back to WinSCP and navigate to the folder on your computer where the new theme was extracted.  Then just click and drag the new themes folder into the folder /public_html/wp-content/themes/ on your server.

Then go to your wordpress admin panel and click on Themes on the left hand side.  Now you will see your new theme is available.  Just click on the picture to bring up a new window that will show what the theme will look like.

On the top right hand side of the window you will see an activate link.  Click on that link and now your WordPress theme is active.  Go to your website and check it out.

All you have to do is repeat the process for any other themes you would like to add.  You want to make sure to pick a theme that goes with what your blog is about.  Take your time looking through all the possibilities and follow the steps outlined in the blog post.

Hope this helps

Brian Lyssy -

Tags: blog post, wordpress blog, WordPress theme

Tags: blog post, wordpress blog, WordPress theme