Installing and Changing Your WordPress Themes
July 4, 2008 – 12:00 pmWhen you get your site set up, or you have your site set up and you have found a theme you like and that fits your website’s purpose, you need to install it.
Just about the only way to install your theme is to use an FTP program to push it to your server into the /wp-content/themes directory. So, if your theme comes in a directory called “MyTheme”, you will push that entire directory up to the server. You will now look in the themes directory and see “MyTheme” as a directory there.
Once the files are all up on the server, login to wordpress and choose the Design Tab.
You should see something similar to this:
As you can see on this screenshot, the default “Kubrick” theme is chosen for my blog because it is at the top left corner under the “Current Theme” header. Also, you can see that there are two other themese available to me. The “WordPress Classic” theme, and the “SilverLight” theme. I have uploaded the silver light theme to my server just the way I talked about previously in this article.
WordPress is smart enough, and the designs are built to specification, so that you can see a preview of the theme from this page. More importantly, you can click the preview to make that theme the current theme on your site. This is particularly handy, when you are a picky person about the themes you use and can’t make up your mind until you see it on your own site.
My suggestion for you is to open one tab of your browser to the Design page on your wordpress admin and open a second tab to the front page of your WordPress site. (If your browser doesn’t have tabs, download firefox - you will be blown away at what you were missing). This way, when you change the them from the Design picker, you can go to your live site and refresh the page to see what it looks like. If you like the one you are looking at, you are done picking your theme.
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