Themes

In this lesson we will look at changing from the installed default WordPress theme too a new theme. Changing and adding themes can be done in two ways, 1: using the built in theme editor. 2: Downloading a theme from the internet and installing it.

 WordPress themes are widely available on the internet both free and paid for (Premium) these themes cover a wide variety of features and layouts. The themes we will use during this lesson will be the Weaver theme and the Greentech theme (which was downloaded from the internet). Downloaded themes should be in a Zip format, WordPress will automatically uncompress all the files during the install process. Firstly we need to login to our site.
Click Appearance. Here we can see the current and any available themes. Click Install Themes. Type Weaver in the search box. Click Search. Click Install. Click Install Now. The Weaver theme has been installed, Click Preview.
Click Activate. Weaver is now the current theme.

Themes

We have changed the site theme from the default to the weaver theme. We will now install the greentech theme which was downloaded earlier and stored on the local pc. To do this we will again use the theme editor but this time instead of using the search facility, we will use the upload facility. The majority of themes you can download will be small zip files which can be handled by the upload facility.
Click Install Themes. Click Upload. Click Browse. Select greentech. Click Open. Click Install Now. Theme has installed click Preview.
Site Preview click X to close this view. Click Activate. Greentech is now the current theme. Note the admin toolbar at the top of the site, this is only visible to the admin when you are logged in. Now return to the site’s backend.
We will now change the site theme back to Weaver click the weaver preview. Click Activate. Weaver is now the current theme.
In this lesson we have looked at two methods of installing themes on your WordPress site. Nearly all themes that you will install have options to customise that theme built in, so with these options you can make your site truly unique. Customising themes will be covered later in the course. In the next lesson we will add pages to the site and order those pages on the menu.