This is post #13 in my Website 101 series; all posts in this series are tagged website101. Subscribe now so you don’t miss future posts.
Look and feel
So far we’ve been building content, and that’s the most important part of your site. Now we want to make sure that it’s presented nicely and in a style consistent with your brand.
Changing the look and feel, the style of your website, is easy with WordPress. WordPress supports themes, which are a nifty little tool to separate the layout, font selections, colors, and more from the content of your site as well as from the all the mechanics of basic website operations.
What does this mean? It means that you can completely upgrade your website’s look and feel in a few minutes, without doing any programming or design work. There are limitations to this approach, of course. Someday you’ll likely need to hire professional help to get things finely tuned to your needs. But for now, you can do an amazing amount on your own. For free and in just a few minutes.
Exploring themes
Click on Themes under the Appearance menu and you’ll see information on your current theme. The Twenty Ten theme is installed by default. It’s a nice looking theme and might be the right choice for your site. But let’s look around first.
To explore themes, click on the Install Themes tab. Here you get a few options to help sort through the overwhelming selection available – most for free – from the large and active community of WordPress developers.
I suggest browsing through Featured and Newest to get a sense of what the various themes look like. Once you’re more familiar with what a theme is and what differentiates one from another, the search function will be more useful.
Checking out a theme
When a theme catches your eye, click on Details to see more information. Here you can see how many times it’s been downloaded and what the average user rating for the theme is.
More interestingly, you can click the Preview link to get a sense of what a theme will look like once it’s installed. You’ll see samples of all sorts of things like different title styles and how it handles different types of lists.
Once you find a theme that looks interesting, install it. (Don’t worry, you can easily switch back to your original theme at any time.) Click on Install and then the Install Now button. You’ll see a status screen like this:
Here the Preview link takes on new meaning. A preview now will show you your site with your data in the preview. This can be handy once your site is live and you want to look at different themes. Since you haven’t launched this new site yet, you can simply Activate your new theme.
Options, options
Depending on the theme you selected, you may see some – or many – new theme-specific options displayed (or added to the WordPress menu bar on the left).
The variety of fine tuning available varies widely from theme to theme. You’ll notice that the differences allow greater control over things like the image displayed in the header of your site, the ability to control how many columns are displayed, and how customizable your menus can be.
This can get a little daunting, so I suggest that you try out several different themes. Get a sense of what a theme is. Explore the variety of design styles. Look at the different types of controls that are offerred. Put some time in, but don’t get stuck here either – remember, a theme can easily be changed any time.
A good approach is to sketch out what you’d like your site to look like. Where does your logo go? What other images do you want to display? How do you want your menus to work? What kinds of things do you want to put in your sidebar? Think through and sketch out as much as you can, and then try to make that vision work with different themes. You’ll find that some things are hard or can’t be done with certain themes, and you’ll find some that seem to fit more “naturally” with your vision for your site. Experiment.
This is post #13 in my Website 101 series; all posts in this series are tagged website101. Subscribe now so you don’t miss future posts.