A fresh install of WordPress isn’t very exciting to look at, so one of the first things you’ll want to do is pick a theme that will add a new face to the plain structure that makes the basic look and feel design. Picking themes can be a very simple process of simply selecting something that catches your eye and matches the feel you think suits your blog, however as you become more experienced you will likely find that your initial choice doesn’t tick all the boxes you are looking for. Luckily you can change your theme as often as you want, and the under lying content remains untouched. You don’t want to be changing your theme too often on an established blog, but in the early days you shouldn’t take your choice too seriously.
SEO Tip: SEO Ready Themes
You will see a number of themes that point out they are SEO ready, which means that the format of the pages has been designed to fit in with what Search Engines want to see as closely as possible. This can be an advantage, but it does not mean that themes not labeled as SEO ready will perform badly. So treat this option as a bonus, in early stages and don’t get hung up on it. We will look at installing some plugins to aid SEO in later lessons, and discuss how a page should be laid out so you can make you own informed choices about how to make you design more search engine friendly.
Info: Widgets
Many themes are widget enabled, which means you can use any of the wide selection of widgets available. Widgets are small blocks of code that add a feature to your blog so you can fully customize the content you display in your blogs columns without needing to edit the themes by hand or know any complicated code. We will look at widgets in more detail in the next lesson.
Activate a Theme For Your WordPress Blog
Adding a theme is very simple, from your WordPress Admin Page, you click the down arrow to the right of “Appearance” and the Themes button lets you browse through the installed themes and activate one you like at the press of a button. Under each themes details you will see two options, Activate and Preview. As you might expect, Preview shows you how the theme will look without making any changes to your site, and when you find one you like, clicking Activate switches to that theme for your whole blog. Alternatively if you have installed you own version of WordPress you can install one of the hundreds or even thousands of themes available for free on the Internet, selecting the “Add New Themes” option from the Appearance box takes you to the theme browser that lets you search through the WordPress Theme archive, and add as many as you want so they become available from the Theme options we just looked at, or if you have downloaded a theme from the Internet you can upload the .zip file using the “upload” option, just under the pages title.
