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One of the great aspects of Wordpress is that it is very easy to customise the look of your website by applying a different design layout or theme to it. There are literally hundreds of thousands of Wordpress themes available for free, and also many more available commercially for a few dollars, or robust themes for business website available at very reasonable prices.
Before looking for a theme, it is a good idea to have a few of your favourite websites in mind, think about what appeals, what you dislike and have a goal in mind. Once you start searching for themes it is easy to be overwhelmed by the options available.
I always look for themes which mention that they are “widget ready”, a widget is a small piece of code which allows you to add practically anything to your website, so if you think of something in the future you would like to add, you can add it using a widget.
Searching for themes is easy, you can look via the Wordpress site here or by performing a Google search.
Keep a list of themes you like, and bookmark their addresses so you can find them later.
A word of warning: Themese can break your whole website, make sure you have a valid backup before installing these. Check your website looks OK frequently. If things go wrong delete the most recently added plugin using FTP and re-check your site. If it can’t be fixed, restore from your backup.
Each theme has it’s own instructions for installation, and I recommend reading them, but the general process is:
- Download the theme as a zip file & unzip on your local computer
- Upload it to your wp-content/themes/ directory on your web server
- Log in to your Wordpress Admin Dashboard & click on themes.
- Click on the thumbnail image of your new theme, then click on activate theme in the top right corner.
- Look at the public side of your website to make sure it looks good.
Once your theme is installed, there may be options which allow you to customise what it looks like on your website, for example, add category lists in the sidebar, change a header image. Each theme will have its own documentation, so it’s best to refer to that to gain a full understanding of what is possible.
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