Build a Blog

Choosing a Theme and Installing

One of the things that appealed to me about Wordpress is it’s customising abilities, with the Wordpress installation you get a default theme, but there are 1,000’s of free themes for Wordpress that you can download and customise to make your own. Or if you have the money, you could have your own designed for you, I would have to be earning a fair bit more before I did that so it’s good that there are so many free themes.

So I had installed Wordpress onto my host (Bluehost) which was really easy because it was a one click installation process using Fantastico, it had really simple instructions and automatically installed the latest version of Wordpress, and I had it done in five minutes. The next step was the theme, I decided I wanted a different theme to the default Kubrick theme and I found mine on the Wordpress theme viewer site. There are loads of sites that do free themes as well, just put a Google search in. But I went to Wordpress itself and used the theme viewer to choose one. It did take a while just because of all the choice, I was like a kid in a sweet shop. Finally I had my theme and after my experience with installing the application itself I was feeling confident that it would be just as easy…

Was I wrong! If you do have a lot of trouble with your theme you can always go to the designer and ask for advice, it generally tells you in the footer who designed it. When you download a theme from a site you will get a folder and sometimes an installation instruction file with it, which is very basic. It will say something like this:

Upload the theme folder into the theme folder. URL/wp-content/themes/
Activate theme

Finding wp-content/themes/?

It looks simply enough but I had one problem with it, where is the wp-content/themes/ folder?

Could I find it, I had no idea where it could be, sure I realised it had something to do with either my hosting account or my Wordpress admin site, but where, because they are both quite extensive in their options. I had had no previous experience of either of them or how they worked or related to one another, so I was really stuck. And obviously it’s such a simple thing to do in blogging that it was hard to find information on where it could be or how to do it. It was as if the step of knowing where wp-content/themes/ is, is too simple. I asked for help in forums and got the same reply, you upload it to your wp-content/themes/ folder. I felt really stupid one day when I went back and replied that I didn’t know what a wp-content/themes/ folder was. Then the penny seemed to drop and I got really helpful step by step instructions on how to do it. Thank goodness!

1. The wp-content/themes/ is found in your hosting account control panel, or you can use 3rd party FTP software to help you do it. I used the Bluehost control panel.
2. I went to Unlimited FTP under files, and that forms a connection between your computer and the host, on the left of the screen is the files on your computer and on the right is the files on your hosting account.
3. On the left I clicked through to the theme folder (and highlighted it) in my computer files that I had downloaded from the theme viewer site, and on the right I clicked through public html, wp-content and then highlighted the themes folder. Once the right folders were highlighted I clicked upload and that was it.

All I had to do then was go into my Wordpress admin site and choose the new theme under the presentation tab. Once I had learned how to do it I was made up, it was a huge weight of my shoulders because it had been so frustrating trying to figure it out. At the end of the day when I knew how it was done, it seemed really obvious and easy to do, such a simple step as well to have had so much trouble with. But beforehand it had been a huge wall stopping me from moving on.

Plugins – kill two birds with one stone!

Plugins give more functionality to your blog and there are a lot to choose from, which is what makes a Wordpress blog so individual. You just have to decide which plugins you want to use. The good thing is when you know how to upload themes then you know how to upload plugins because it’s practically the same process. Download the plugin to your computer then go into your unlimited FTP on your host, or use your 3rd party software and then just use the same process as before. But highlight the plugins folder instead of the themes folder in your hosting account, click through public html, wp- content then highlight the plugins folder and upload. The final step is to go into your Wordpress admin site and activate the plugin through your plugin tab. The site you download the plugin from will also have instructions on how to install it, read them because some plugins can be tricky, but the basics of installation are still the same.

If I have just waffled and made no sense whatsoever, or you like to learn visually then you may like to take a look at Wordpress quickstart which explains the basics of Wordpress with videos. This post will probably seem trivial and incredibly obvious to a lot of you, but I hope it helps someone out there who is in the same place as where I was! We all have to learn these easy steps at some point, but with experience they can easily be forgotten and over looked. So that’s why I wrote it to help the true beginners in there very first steps, and long may it continue…

Mandy

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