Your first article is posted and displayed on your homepage. Everything seems great. Now I’ll show you how to change a theme (design) of your blog. First of all I’ll recommend some great sources where to find free nice looking themes, and then I’ll describe process of connecting to your FTP server the simplest way. Finally we’re going to show how to install your Wordpress theme.
Someone says design is half of your success. I don’t think it’s true, but I agree the appearance is important part and you shouldn’t neglect it. One of the huge advantages of Wordpress publishing system is fact, that you can find millions of free nice looking designs on the internet. If you want your sites to look even more original, you can choose to pay for professional looking theme or hire someone who does it for you.
Every time when I start a new site I try to keep my expenses as low as possible. So for every start-up I use free theme. If my project gets more traffic and I see I’m successful, I can hire someone to design special Wordpress theme for me of buy some pre-made solution.
If you don’t want to read the whole article, you can watch my video about choosing Wordpress Theme, connecting to FTP server, uploading and installing theme on your blog.
Where to find free nice looking themes?
Let me just briefly explain to you, why so many developers make Wordpress themes for free. The reason is that they insert their link to their sites usually into the footer to your blog. Search engines like one way links and developer’s site will appear higher in the search results. It’s a win-win situation.
On the most of sites with Wordpress themes you’ll be able to preview chosen theme. That will help you to decide what appearance would suit your blog the best. Let’s take a look on some sources of your future design:
- Wordpress.org- Official free themes directory where you can find almost 800 themes available for immediate download.
- FreeWordPressThemes.com- Site where I found many great themes for a lot of my sites.
- TemplateBrowser.com- Simple site that provides a lot of Wordpress themes. II used them couple times.
- SmashingMagazine.com- Good post about 100 Excellent Free Wordpress Themes.I used couple of them.
- SixRevisions.com- Article about 50 Beautiful Free Wordpress Themes. I used couple of them.
- WPThemesFree.com- Big database of design for Wordpress.
- And much more. For more results search for themes in your search engine.
I didn’t like any free theme. Where to find premium one?
There are a lot of sites offering amazing themes and charging some fees for downloading it. You can either google them of look on Woo Themes or ThemeSpinner. One theme that really kicked me and almost immediately persuade me to download was Thesis Wordpress Theme. I know a lot of people using it and I’m thinking of implementing this theme on my blog too. Other way is to pay a professional who will design it for you. Try to search on Elance.com.
We found nice theme we want to implement on our sites but we don’t know how. Now is the time to connect to your FTP server. There is lots of software to use. You can look closer on FileZilla, FireFTP or Fetch for Mac. Personally I have use Total Commander and Dreamweaver. You can choose to try one of those or follow my next tip how to log in your server without installing anything. We’ll need just My Computer (File Explorer) or Internet Explorer. Following solution works fine with DreamHost web hosting I use and described before in my review.
How to connect to FTP server?
- Open My Computer (You need to have Windows operation system for this). It’s usually located on your desktop.
- Type ftp://yourdomain.com/ (instead of yourdomain.com put the name of your domain) into address line and press enter.
- You’ll be asked for username and password, fill it.
- After a few seconds you should be logged in. Open folder called the same name as your domain (yourdomain.com).
- Now you are on the server folder, where your publishing system Wordpress is installed. Go into “wp-content”, then click on “themes”.
- Download theme into your computer from the site where you found it. Now it’s compressed so you have to extract it (if you don’t know how to do it, take a look here).
- Drag the folder from your computer to My Computer window into the folder I described before.
- After the copying process you should see your new theme folder on your server.
How to install theme in your administration panel?
- After files are uploaded you can log in into Wordpress administration panel and click on “Appearance” link in the left menu sidebar.
- Find your theme on “Manage Theme” page that appeared and click on it.
- The system will show you a preview of your site. If you like it, click „Activate NameOfChosenTheme“
- After that you can check your homepage. You appearance should change.
Now you can download Wordpress theme, upload it on your server and install it in your administration center. You can have almost unlimited number of themes and change them every day. I recommend you to don’t change it so much. Your audience doesn’t want to see different design and structure of your blog every time.
In the next post we’ll talk about great plugins you need to install in order to make your blog works better and be successful.
