How To Become A Blogger Step 6: How To Choose A WordPress Theme For Your Blog

Note: The theme website inside this video has changed, but the principles for installing a theme remain the same.

How To Find And Install A WordPress Theme For Your Blog

What is a theme?

Your blog’s theme is a simple way of managing your sites layout, stylesheets, and typeface. Your theme will determine how you want your readers to view your blog posts and your website as a whole.

Thanks to the open source nature of wordpress there are thousands of free blog themes that are ready to go right out of the box. Each theme is also easy to modify to better fit your needs.

How To Find The Perfect Theme For Your Blog

1. Pay A professional / Hire A Web Designer - Visit a site like www.elance.com to find someone who will design your blog for you or you can find a local company to do it as well.

2. Use A Free WordPress Theme - Go to the official WordPress Themes Page or search the internet for “WordPress Themes” to find tons of themes websites on the web.

3. Design The Theme Yourself – After you spend some time looking at themes you will be able to learn the simple HTML, CSS, & PHP languages that will enable you to modify existing themes or even write one yourself from sctratch.

How To Download And Install A WordPress Theme

You can either install a theme directly from the wordpress themes tab in your admin area or you can install the theme through the back end by downloading the theme to you hard drive.

How to install a theme automatically?

1. Go to your wordpress admin area.

2. Click on the “Appearance” tab > “Themes”

3. At the top there should be a section for “Manage Themes” and “Install Themes”

4. Click “Install Themes”

5. You will be taken to an advanced search for themes. If you know the name of the theme you are looking for then you can simply search for it now.

If you do not know which theme you are looking for then you should browse through the available themes here until you find one you like.

6. Once you have chosen a theme, click on “Install“. If you choose to, you can make this your current theme back on the “Manage Themes” tab.

You may try out several themes before you find the perfect one for you.

How to manually install a wordpress theme?

1. Download the theme files from the website where the theme was showcased.

2. Unzip them to a folder on your hard drive.

3. Use an FTP program to upload the theme files into the following directory:

/public_html/wp-content/themes/”THEMENAME”/

You can upload as many theme’s as you like to this directory, but be sure to upload each theme to its own new folder.

4. Find a couple that you like then login to your wordpress admin area and click on the “Appearance Tab” > “Themes“. Now each of the uploaded themes should show up in the “Available Themes” area. Choose the one you like and after previewing it you can choose “activate” to make the theme your current theme.

Advanced WordPress Themes

To edit the theme click on the “Appearance Tab” > “Editor” or you can download the theme files to your hard drive and edit them in a text editor and then upload them using FTP.

Be warned that changing your websites theme can cause errors on the page. Always back up your theme files before modifying.