How To Change A Wordpress Theme
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Do you like my new theme for Build a Blog, it is very different to my last one, but I really like it and think it suits the blog very well. What do you think?
Why Did I Want To Change?
The main reason I wanted to change my theme was presentation. The above the fold area, the part of the blog that you immediately see when it loads was not presented well. Beforehand you could hardly see any of the blog itself, you could only just see the latest post, it was all header. Now it looks a lot better with more information to view before having to scroll, and it’s not so cluttered, making it look cleaner and easier to read.
Here are some before and after shots so you can see what I mean. 
You can see how much difference the new theme has made! There will no doubt be a few more tweaks I make along the way, but I don’t want to concentrate any more time on the overall design it will just be updating the information. I am very happy with it, though it may take a little while for me to get used to it looking like this, and recognise it as my blog!
Was it easy to change themes?
Well I am eating my words! It wasn’t as easy as I thought it was going to be. But very satisfying now it is done!
It should be a simple case of choosing a theme, and uploading it to my host and then choosing it in the presentation tab, in my wordpress admin, to change it over.
It is very easy to change a theme in wordpress, I just had to click on the chosen theme (as above). But getting the blog to function the same wasn’t as easy. Not all of the code and links that I added to the old theme were brought across to the new one. So I had to go into the old theme editor to find the missing information and copy them across to the new theme editor, which took a bit of time.
What went wrong?
Well, first of all you may notice that this isn’t the Red Book theme that I said I was going to use for this blog (in my picking a theme post). I do like the Red Book theme and I did put it on this blog for a while, but I just couldn’t get used to a sidebar on the left. It was a bit of an experiment anyway to see what it looked like with the content in the middle of the sidebars. But I quickly realised that this wasn’t for me, and it’s just down to my individual taste rather than anything wrong with the theme itself. So I have put it down to experience and bloggers prerogative to change my mind, and used a different Brian Gardner theme called Silhouette, that I was going to use anyway before I found the Red Book theme.
What did I learn?
I did learn a lot from changing themes, although it was frustrating at times. I didn’t want to disrupt the blog, and have all kinds of changes happening while visitors were trying to read (if that happened then I apologize). But I did find a way to edit the theme behind the scenes and keep the disruption to a minimum. I went into the presentation tab again in my wordpress admin, then theme editor and selected a theme to be edited. I could copy and paste the missing information over between the theme editors, and save the changes without any of it being scene on the blog.
This was all done by trial and error, because I don’t know much about html. I’m just feeling around as I go and copying from different areas in the themes structure to see if it works. Sometimes it goes wrong so I make a back up copy of the blog first before I start just in case!
I loved working with this theme as it is a lot easier to edit and change than the last theme I had, and the layout is a lot easier to understand and use. I don’t use the widgets, although all the themes I have used have been widget ready. Simply because I find them harder to deal with then just having a go with the html. If I get stuck I ask for help in forums or just do a Google search, and slowly I am gaining more experience and confidence as I go.
It’s also good experience and practice for the case study blog, and sorting out the theme for that.
Thanks
Mandy
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