Wordpress Theme Setup

Full instructions: Installing and Setting Up a WordPress Theme

Hello, With WordPress users. I guess you're here because you've been browsing through the wealth of WordPress topics out there and choosing the right WordPress topic for your still young WordPress page. Now you are full of thrill and agitation to start the installation of your selected theme on your WordPress page. And how do I get a WordPress theme installed?

We' ll be spending the next 3,000 words showing you virtually everything you need to know about installing and setting up a WordPress theme. It' a long guideline and I know that you are thrilled to get your WordPress page up and running, so let us get right on to installing your WordPress theme!

You may need to use one of two different ways to have a WordPress theme installed, based on the location of your WordPress theme. WordPress topics have two major sources: WordPress.org Topics List - this huge list contains only free WordPress topics. You can search through hundreds of free topics, all of which have been reviewed for their codes by WordPress.org members.

Third Vendor Resources - You can get topics from third parties such as ElegantThemes (our review) or huge WordPress theme markets such as Theme Forest. Once you have found your theme on WordPress.org, use method 1 to set up your free theme. Use method 2 if you purchased your design or a free design from a third-party vendor.

You should have a zipped version of your design for these occasions. Once you've found your design on WordPress.org, you can download it directly from your WordPress dashboard without uploading it. In order to start, login to your WordPress Dashboard (i.e. go to yourdomain.com/wp-admin).

Then go to Appearance Themes in the side bar at ? and click the Add New button: Then browse for the name of the topic you want to have installed and click the button Install: Now WordPress installs the design on your website for you. After the installation is complete, you can activate the theme by pressing the Activate button:

Your WordPress theme has just been uploaded. When you have bought a WordPress theme or a free design from a different resource than WordPress.org, you must download and upload a zip archive called . to the theme's installation program. Unless you have a zip for your design, you should ask the developers for help to find the zip.

As soon as you have it, go to Appearance Themes and click New New:: Then click the Upload Topic button: Click the Choose Files icon to choose the . Zip of your theme, and then click the Install Now button: The WordPress theme installs the theme to your computer for you. Then all you have to do is click Activate to make the design active:

Your WordPress theme has just been uploaded. You may need to have some plug-ins in place, dependent on the theme you have already uploaded, for the theme to work correctly. Let's just say, without going too far into the complex engineering detail, the separation of theme and plug-in features enhances safety and makes it easy to modify theme over time.

When you need to have the plug-ins installed to use the theme, after you activate your theme, a notification field appears as shown below: In the next window, you can click the Connect icon to connect as many of the suggested plug-ins as you want. It is also possible to deploy several plug-ins at once by using the check boxes to the right of each plug-ins name.

As soon as WordPress has installed the plug-in, you also have the possibility to enable the plug-in, which you have to do to make your design work well. It is one of the most frequent problems that new WordPress user are experiencing. Fortunately, there's something named "demo content" that allows you to quickly make your design look exactly like the nice demonstration website that fell in love with your design.

There is no need to use demonstration contents if you don't want to - it's just a useful utility to launch your website. But if you already like what your site looks like without the demonstration contents, you can just go ahead and just disregard this part! Unfortunately, there is no single way to import demos.

This means that each topic can treat things a little differently. The best way is to check the topic's manual and look for a section about "demo content", "dummy data", "import" or similar. Use caution - adding a theme's demonstration contents will override any changes you have already made to the design.

So, if you plan to use demonstration code, it's a good suggestion to try bringing in demonstration code before making any changes to your design. Therefore, we suggest that you start using the imported demonstration contents now. In the next section we will show you how to customise your WordPress theme to make it your own.

Regardless of whether you choose to customize the imported demos or not, the next thing you'll probably want to do is customize your design to really make it your own. You have a few different ways to customize your WordPress theme, and we will discuss them all in this section.

Since WordPress initially began only as a blogsite, the standard setup is still set to display your latest blogs on the home page of your site. However, if you prefer to display a fixed page on your home page, you can always modify this feature by going to Preferences Read in your WordPress dashboard.

WordPress Customizer is a useful WordPress function that allows you to simply customize your design while viewing all your changes in real time. This means you see theme choices on one side of your monitor and a lived look at your website on the other. Although not all designs use the WordPress Customizer, many new designs use it to make changes.

Even if a design does not fully understand WordPress Customizer, you can still use it to make some fundamental changes to your design. This is why it is a good starting point for customising your design. In order to use the WordPress Customizer, you can either go to Appearance ? Customize in your WordPress Dashboard:

Alternatively, if you're surfing the publicside part of your WordPress page, you can click the Customize icon on the Administrative Toolbar: In WordPress Customizer, you can browse between different adjustment modes by selecting from the side bar options: the real design choices are probably different from the sample on the screen.

There are a few general purpose options, but topic creators are also free to choose to put tonnes of their own. That' s why you might need to take a look to see exactly what your own design has to offer. If you want to modify the colors of your design, for example, simply click the Colors button.

You can then select a new colour scheme for your design and view the changes in full screen without having to update the page: According to how versatile your design is, you can adjust every little detail of your design from this area to the colour for certain text sorts.

Or it could be like the example motif, where you can only select a different colour theme. Several WordPress topics choose to use their own theme setting window instead of or in addition to the WordPress Customizer user interfaces I've shown you above. These choices are entirely dependant on the designer and may or may not be true for your design.

Normally, you can find these items by searching for topic items in the Appearance section of your dashboard: Their design may use a different concept or placing, but most designs that don't use the WordPress Customizer treat things that way. If you see any changes in these theme items, they are entirely up to the theme designer.

An example can be seen in the following screenshots, but the user interfaces of your theme may look very different: These customized option panel usually give you a lot of design flexibility. Maps are important navigational areas of your topic. While most designs have at least one top level pull-down on the page, some designs use a side bar instead:

Whilst you can use the WordPress Customizer in advance to set up your menu, a user-friendly way to get to Appearance is to use the ? menu in your WordPress dashboard. Widget is another ingenious tool that lets you easily extend your side bar, bottom bar (not in all themes) and any other area that is widgettized with fun functions.

Almost every design does include side bar widget functionality, but not all designs do include footers and other areas. In order to append a widget to your new design, go to Appearance at ? Appidgets. There are some widgets that don't need much configuration, while others need you to go through several different settings to get started.

When you want to delete a widget, you can either drop it back into the available widget area or click the Delete icon at the bottom of the widget's preferences. WordPress is shipped with a set of built-in Wordidgets. Besides these Widgets, your design may or may not be adding its own user-defined ones.

If you want even more features, you can find tonnes of plug-ins that are able to include extra Widgets that you can use. In this section you will find some more sophisticated (and completely optional) adjustments to your WordPress theme. When you have completed the above mentioned fundamental design setup steps, you may need to make further changes.

However, if you want to get into changes that aren't already part of your theme's option, you need to get your hand a little soiled. You can also ask a WordPress programmer to make changes for you if you don't feel ready. In general, the CSS and other codes will help you make extended changes to the styles and/or functions of your WordPress theme beyond the scope of the WordPress Customizer and/or theme setting dashboards.

The following section explains how to apply customized styles to your design and how to optimize its kernel behavior. When you' re not feeling well, ask a programmer for help or just skipped this section. A recent modification now allows you to customize any WordPress theme with your own customized style sheet using the WordPress Customizer you saw above.

In order to browse to this section of our website, go to ? Customizing and choose the Added Customizes CSS page in the WordPress Customizer: If, for example, you are adding a brief class of CSS targeting the theme's buttons, it will be as follows: Background: We also wrote an article about learning how to use WordPress and a few basic sections of it that will help you adapt your WordPress page.

You need to take your while to become a true Creative Document Manager, but once you learn enough Creative Document Management to make small changes to your WordPress theme, you won't have to bother so much once you have an overview of the fundamentals. When you plan to make changes to your website that go beyond just making changes to your website's style sheet and allow you to edit your own theme file, it is imperative that you make what is known as a children theme before you begin making your changes.

When you make changes to your current design directly, you loose those changes when you upgrade your WordPress design (which should be done periodically if your developers maintain the design). However, if you create a sub theme, you can keep your changes even if you upgrade the higher-level theme file.

How can you actually build a sub-theme? A few programmers provide ready-made sub-topics for their topics, so you should review your topic document before starting your own business. When you find a sub-topic there, you can upload its zip to your website to have it installed just like any other topic.

Should this not reveal anything, the free Childify Me plug-in can generate a theme for you to use. As soon as you have installed and activated the Childify Me plug-in, start the WordPress Customizer by going to Appearance ? Customize. Then click the Childify Me icon below to auto-generate a children's theme:

Name your child's topic (the name can be anything - it doesn't matter) and then click Make. Then click Preview and Activation to enable your brand's new children's theme. When you need to make new templates for your changes, FTP lets you copy your current templates from your theme to your subtopic and/or make new empty ones that you use for making changes to your codes.

If your subdesign is running, you can continue with changes to the source tree and not run the chance of replacing them the next forever. Since you have just uninstalled your design, you are unlikely to need to upgrade your design immediately. However, over the course of your development, the developers of your theme will hopefully publish new releases of the theme.

If this happens, you should upgrade your design to make sure your site continues to work correctly. WordPress will warn you whenever your design has an upgrade available by displaying a number next to the Updates item in the side bar of your dashboard: If you click this button, you will be taken to an application where you can upgrade your WordPress design to the latest version whenever you want.

Simply select the tick the checkbox next to the topic and click Refresh Topics: Wordprocess takes care of the remainder of the updating for you! When you have followed this full manual and are still grappling with your WordPress topic, don't be afraid! Below are a few ways to get help with your WordPress topic.

When you use a free design of WordPress.org, you can try to ask the developers for help by using the built-in WordPress.org user interface boards. In order to get hold of the forum, go to the list page of the topic in WordPress. Since you are using a free design, be aware that the designer often helps you out of the kindness of his soul.

Whilst most devs do not provide face-to-face technical assistance for free designs, if you have bought a premier theme, you should have special assistance from the theme's designer. Although this is a different procedure for each topic creator, you can usually find information about how to get help, either in your welcome e-mail or on the developer's website:

While most theme creators provide essential assistance, they don't have the tools to help you extend the capabilities beyond the topic. This is your case and you will probably need to contact a third vendor that develops WordPress. The WP Kraken - full of WordPress professionals who can help you with small optimizations or new functions.

Codable - Codable is not the least expensive option, but it allows only high level WordPress librarians to offer on work. As an alternative, you can also take advantage of a WordPress subscription per month. We have compiled a WordPress support schedule if you are interested in these features. You are now a WordPress Theme Specialist!

You' ve made it through this extensive manual and know pretty much everything there is to know about installing and setting up a WordPress theme. Now you can get started and begin to create some great contents for your WordPress page! And if you are still looking for more features, you should also check out how to select and deploy WordPress plug-ins.

The WordPress plugin opens up a vast new dimension of website functionalities and plays well with your current design.