Themes are one of the most exciting aspects of WordPress. The separation of control of the look and feel from content allows tremendous flexibility. This includes the ability to completely re-vamp and re-fresh your website without the need to re-publish content. How smart is that?
Before giving you a simple step by step guide to the installation of WordPress themes a few caveats and notes of caution.
- There are several thousand free themes. If you are smart choose one of the basic themes like Twenty Ten, Twenty Eleven, Twenty Twelve, Twenty Thirteen or, the newest in the series, Twenty Fourteen. Theme selection can be a huge time vacuum. These basic themes should get you up and running, and provide all the basic functionality you need. Spend your time getting the content ready and a basic layout/navigation structure.
- Never use a theme that you find randomly posted on the internet. It may contain malicious code of varying degrees of nastiness. At best they may steal advertising clicks at worse they will steal your vistors identity. The simplest way to instal a theme is through the WordPress Dashboard and, because these are in the WordPress.org theme repository, they are likely to be good.
- When you do start to choose a theme look for the more popular options and those that have been supported for the longest period. Fortunately they all allow some customisation so there’s no excuse for your website to look like everybody else’s.
- It may be easy to change themes and there maybe a lot to choose from. Most are even free. But just because you can does not mean you should. Constantly changing themes maybe disconcerting to your regular visitors and might distract from your message. You may even confuse people in to thinking they are in the wrong place.
Step by Step Installing WordPress Themes
Step 1: Once you are in the WordPress dashboard area click on Appearance>Themes on the left sidebar. This takes you to the main theme admin area.
Step 2: You may already have some themes installed and you can look through these. For more choices click on the Add New button at the top of the page. This takes you to the main Install Themes page with lots of ways to search for a new Theme.
Step 3: Searching for WordPress Themes.
(a) If you already know the name of the Theme simply enter it in the search box.
(b) If you are not sure which Theme will be best try Feature Filter search option. A word to the wise. This is not always as successful as you might think as it depends on how good the Theme author is at choosing keywords.
(c) The other option is to search for something like the “10 best WordPress Themes`. Cream tends to rise to the top so check out a few results and see if you start to see a consensus around best option.
Truth is that at this time you are probably not clear exactly what you want so relax, concentrate on content and remember that you can chane the theme anytime you want.
Step 4: Now that you have searched and found a potential «Theme you`ll see that underneath there are three options. Install Now, Preview and Details. Preview is OK but often doesn`t truly reflect the final look and feel but is better than nothing. Similarly Details is OK but its usefulness depends on the quality of the theme author.
Step 5: