Imagine that you no longer want your red themed site and want a blue one, or if you need a three column site rather than a one column site. That’s easy to do simply by changing the theme.

There are thousands of WordPress themes available to choose from, from free to premium quality, magazine style, blog style, corporate style, the list goes on.

OK, so how do you go about changing a WordPress theme?

First of all log into your WordPress Dashboard found at yoursite.com/wp-admin. From there you need to click Appearance on the left, and then Themes.

Clicking the Install Themes tab at the top will give you some options: you can Search for a theme using the search box and the filter tick boxes at the bottom, or you can Upload a theme from your computer, or search by Featured, Newest or Recently updated themes.

Let say that you’re going to look for a blue blog theme, type Blog into the search box and tick Blue and then hit search.

You will then be faced with all the possibilities from your search, which you can browse through. By clicking the Preview link below each Image you can see roughly how the them will look. When you have decided on your perfect theme, click the install button. WordPress will then download the theme. Once done click the Activate link.

The theme will then be live on your site. You need to do a few things now. Firstly, have a look at the setting of the theme (most have these) and change what you need to, from colours, font sizes, to menus and widgets. Then have a look at your site and make sure everything is OK, as sometimes themes don’t always do what’s expected, especially free themes.

Downloaded a theme, and decide actually you don’t like it? No problem a few more clicks and you can revert back to your original theme. Simply go tot Appearances, Themes find your theme in the list of available themes and click Activate. Done.

So there you have it, changing a theme on WordPress is simple and quick, allowing you to change your sites look without coding knowledge or paying a web designer.

Content comes first

The first place everyone wants to start with a website is design and it is very easy to get sidetracked by this. My advice is to start by listing all of the content you want to include on the site and then to look for a design which supports your requirement. If you start with the design first, you will find yourself trying to fill gaps and plug holes, which can be hard to do. It is true that if you are going to purchase an off-the-shelf WordPress theme, then you are at the mercy of what’s available, but most templates are customisable so you should be able find a pretty close fit.

Choosing a WordPress theme

The hardest part of launch a website using WordPress is choosing a theme, also known as a template. Typing WordPress themes into Google delivers 128,000 results. The sites I found the most consistent in terms of quality and price were Theme Forest, StudioPress and Viva Themes. My recommendation is to try not to be dazzled by the designs and focus on designs that fit your needs. Also, a WordPress theme site will should provide you with a detailed run down of everything that is included with the theme. Be sure to check:

• Browser compatibility, has it been tested again all major browsers
• Which files are included e.g. Images, CSS style sheets etc.
• If it is widget-ready and can be customised using WordPress widgets
• Whether technical support is provided
• Comments and rating left by users.

Test before you buy

One of the biggest stumbling blocks I faced when launching my business site was how well the themes I installed performed in different browsers – even when it stated the templates has been tested in all major browsers. The issue I found was a slight ‘stall’ that would occur when the sites loaded up. This was only half a second, but long enough to annoy a visitor to the site. Most sites will provide a ‘live preview’ version of the template. My advice is open the preview in all of the major browsers to make sure you are happy with how quickly the site loads.

Plug in SEO

I am convinced that SEO involves some kind of black magic at times, but there are plenty of plugins out there to get you started. After trialing a few, I chose SEO1. It’s nice and simple to configure and works well. Once your site has been up and running for few weeks I’d advise downloading a trial of SEO MOZ, which will run through your site and point out where you can improve on your on-page optimisation and give you a clear idea of how your site is ranking and performing compared to your competitors.

A good resource: 8 Excellent WordPress SEO Plugins

Utilise one-click hosting

If you are at ease with configuring servers and have your own FTP software, then you probably don’t need help setting up hosting for your website. If you’re new to WordPress and want an easy way to get your site live, then there are web hosting companies offering ‘one-click’ WordPress installation and hosting packages. I chose Oz Hosting, and for $10 a month, it does what it says on the tin. The only disadvantage is that you might not have access to the server itself and will need to rely on WordPress to configure your site.

Integrate social media

If you want to integrate social media into your website, and allow people to share, tweet and like pages and posts, there are dozens of plugins to choose from. However, if you don’t want ‘share’ and ‘like’ buttons to appear on every page, and just your posts, make sure this option is available. I have installed the ‘Really simple Facebook and Twitter share buttons’ and this works well.

Use the WordPress community

The WordPress community is huge, so make sure you tap into user forums for advice and tips if you experience any issues along the way. The official WordPress site has excellent user and technical support forums and should be any WordPress users first port of call.

Firstly we need to install your own personal web server to run WordPress. WordPress requires a web server, a MySQL database and the PHP scripting language to run. Installing and configuring these in the past was hard work but there’s now an application called WAMP (Windows – Apache – MySQL – PHP) which installs and configures everything to get your own personal web server up and running.

Normally you’d pay a web host to host your website or blog and they’d provide the web server, database server and scripting but we’re going to install our own personal web server so we can do anything we like in our own personal WordPress test lab at zero cost.

Visit the WAMP site and download the WAMP Server. Once the file has downloaded double-click it to install the WAMP software.

Once the install begins accept the license agreement and all the default installation options and select to create a desktop icon at the end of the installation.

Once installed and running you’ll have a WAMP icon down in the system tray in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen (it looks like a semi-circle)click the WAMP icon down in the system tray and select phpMyAdmin – if the phpMyAdmin page displays then this tells us that the webserver is running and the php script can connect to our MySQL database so you’re up and running.

We now have a functioning WAMP web & database server running on our PC. This server provides practically all the functionality that a paid hosting account offers but costs nothing and is for your personal use or use on an internal network if you’re teaching WordPress. It would be possible to use WAMP to host your live blog but we’d advise that it’s much better for your live blog to be hosted at a web hosting company rather than allowing people to connect to your own PC running WAMP as there are security, speed and availability issues in running your own publicly accessible web server.

We have our web server now all we need to do is install WordPress. If you haven’t already started WAMP start it by double-clicking the WAMP desktop icon. Open ‘My Computer’ or Windows Explorer and navigate to C:/WAMP/WWW and then create a new folder in the WWW folder called wordpress.

We then need to download WordPress so go to the WordPress web site and download the latest version of WordPress. Once it’s downloaded extract/unzip the installation file and copy the contents of its ‘wordpress’ folder to c:/wamp/www/wordpress.

If you’ve downloaded WordPress and successfully copied the WordPress files into the correct folder you can open a browser and go to http://localhost/wordpress – you should see a WordPress page asking you to create a configuration file. So go ahead and click ‘create a configuration file’.

WordPress then asks for the database hostname, username and password to connect to your MySQL server. WordPress is a dynamic content management system so anything you post in WordPress is stored in a MySQL database so when a visitor visits your blog or you edit a post WordPress dynamically pulls this information from the database displays it. In order to do this we need to create a blank database with a username and password so WordPress can connect to it. WordPress will do all the hard work of populate this database with all the correct tables but we have to manually create the database and username and password before WordPress can do this.

Click the WAMP icon in the lower right hand corner of your screen and select phpMyAdmin. phpMyAdmin should now load in your browser so then in the ‘create new database’ box enter wordpress_db and click ‘create’.

Now we need to add a user to the database. In phpMyAdmin click the ‘Privileges’ tab then click ‘Add a new User’. In the ‘user name’ box enter wordpress_user (or a username of your choice) and enter a password in the ‘password’ and ‘re-type’ boxes. Ensure that under ‘database for user’ the option ‘Grant all privileges on database “wordpress_db”‘ is selected and then click ‘Go’ down at the bottom right.

Now if we go back to the WordPress installation screen we can enter the database name, username and password we just created using phpMyAdmin. The database host should be localhost and we’ll leave the table prefix as wp_.

Now click ‘submit’ and WordPress should say that it can now communicate with the database. Click the ‘run the install’ button. We then can fill in the options for site title, username and password – this username and password is the WordPress username and password that you’d like to use to administer your WordPress blog so you can make up your own username and password which can (and should!) be different from the database username and password we created earlier.

Click ‘install WordPress’ and WordPress should then say you’ve successfully installed it and if you click the login button and enter your WordPress username and password you’re up and running!

Just remember to make sure your WAMP server is running first otherwise you won’t be able connect.

To login into your WordPress installation and makes changes or postings in future just go to http://localhost/wordpress/wp-login.php and to view your blog just go to the same URL but without the wp-login.phh

Steve blogs about installing and setting up WordPress blogs as well as providing WordPress installation services.

You can catch more of his articles and video tutorials at http://www.blogsetuplab.com

Adding Support for Navigation Menus

You will have to add the PHP code provided below to your theme’s functions.php file (otherwise the custom menu option will not show up in the admin panel):

add_theme_support( ‘menus’ );

Adding a Navigation Menu to a WordPress Theme

Next you will want to tell WordPress where in your theme you want to place a menu. Generally, you would want to do this somewhere in your header.php file, where your theme’s header content is located. You may however add a custom menu to any part of your WordPress theme you think is best. Using the code provided below you can easily create one or even several spots for a custom menu to appear:

‘Top Menu’, ‘sort_column’ => ‘menu_order’, ‘container_class’ => ‘top-menu’ ) );?>

The above code is a simple call to the wp_nav_menu function which is built into the WordPress engine. The argument provided contains an array of attributes that may be used to configure the way a custom menu should be displayed at this location in the theme.

The first attribute is name, which is the name or label that will identify this menu in WordPress.
The second attribute is sort_column, which we gave a value of menu_order. This option tells WordPress that we want to use the ordering we choose in the admin panel.
The third attribute is container_class. This controls which CSS class will be used to style the menu.

Advantages of Using WordPress Navigation Menus

As you can already probably see, there are many advantages to using the custom menu feature that is now provided in WordPress 3.0. Most website owners begin by adding a simple navigation menu to the top of their WordPress theme, however you can certainly add many more custom menus then just one. Another advantage, is the ability to add a custom menu as a widget to your sidebar. Again this feature is also built-in to the WordPress admin panel.

My name is Derek Skeba and I have been involved in web development and internet marketing for almost a decade now. I run a small online publishing company, Media Vim LLC. I am very interested in SEO and capturing internet traffic. If you would like to learn more about WordPress or the services I provide, please check out my WordPress CMS Book.

The following ways of templates improvement don’t require any knowledge of code or other specific skills:

Optimize template pictures

Images used by WordPress templates developers are sometimes not optimized. You may optimize them easily using reduce their size which is possible with “Save for Web” feature you will find in the Adobe Photoshop toolkit. Besides, you may use the special Smush.it tool that allows to optimize the images without loss of quality.

The images you may optimize are the logo, stock images, icons, headings, CSS background images etc. What do you need the images optimization for? This can significantly improve the valuable for your readers page response times.

Reduce the WordPress theme files size.

Some WP templates include not minified CSS or JavaScript files and you may enhance the template by reducing their file sizes. This process is called minification and gets rid of the extra characters such as spaces and tabs. Speaking about JavaScript, you are free to minify it with the special free JavaScript Compressor. As for HTML there are plugins like W3 Total Cache that will minify the front-end HTML code to improve the blog speed.

Apply a custom favicon.

You may have noticed the tiny icon representing a website in browser tabs address bars. This is the favicon that should also represent your brand and look professional.

To include this favicon you may simply place the following code inside the header.php in your template directory:

The location of your favicon file can be pointed in place of the href attribute value.

Use custom styles to make image captions stand out.

The WordPress image captions serve to describe images. WordPress themes usually include the default styles for these captions. And you may change the.wp-caption class in your template styles.css to pally the certain unique style for all image captions.
Make the template code secure

This can be achieved by removing the generic WordPress code you will find inside tags of your template. This action will prevent the other users from knowing our WordPress version that could help them to attack your website using some weak points of the definite versions.

Use the third-party search feature instead of the default search bar

Many users don’t even know that they can easily replace the core search function with another search service that is more accurate and fast like Google Custom Search or Yahoo! Search BOSS. Using the authoritative third-party search option will reduce your server load for searches.

Use WordPress Internet marketing tools

To bring more traffic to your WordPress blog you may use the following market tools:

All in One SEO Pack
XML Sitemap Generator
digg digg
Onlywire autosubmit plugin
Twitter tools

All the aforementioned steps will improve your WordPress themes, enhance promotion and bring more dedicated visitors to your blog.

Stan Lem is not a newbie in writing for the web – he started about 5 years ago and took special involvement in the area of website development and website templates – more specifically WordPress Themes

© by stefanx80

Choosing WordPress for today’s article then begs the question; how do you set about designing a site theme for WordPress?

There is a myriad of excellent advice on the WordPress site, but it tends to lead the designer into the realms of hard coding which is not necessarily the most efficient way to go about this process.

Take for example the following process. Client approaches the website designer and requests a new website design, logo and general business design package. The designer has been working in the design business for 20 years and is at the top of their game with regard visual skills.

The situation then arises that complicates and waters down the effect of emplying such an experienced and talented designer. If he is so well thought of as a designer, is it likely that he will have the necessary coding skills to create a theme based on his design?

I think the obvious answer is not very likely at all. So the next step is to employ a web developer to convert the designers imaginative and creative design into a theme that will work on a new WordPress site and will grow easily as the site becomes more populated with articles, dynamic instructiveness and general advance. Of course all this extra labour made available at the website designer’s business begins to add overheads which are just not practical when trying to compete in the website design market. A $1500 project suddenly looks like a $3000-$10,000 project just to cover the massive increase in overheads that arise as a result of carrying all these extra staff.

Luckily there are programmes on the market that can almost entirely remove one of these steps. I say almost as there are caveats and they are important. Artisteer produce software that has a great drag and drop UI which allows anyone with a modicum of experience at using a computer to create fully working templates/themes for a number of the more popular CMS packages.

For the WordPress CMS, having spent quite some time with the graphic designer getting the basic layout of the site designed it is an easy task to translate what the designer has created into a fully functioning, but basic WordPress theme. These Artisteer created themes for WordPress will always include sidebars and widget areas but are not always terribly adaptable to the current theming going on in the top professional theming houses such as YooTheemes, Woothemes and RocketThemes whose templates are fantastic, but fairly pricey. Themes that have 70 -90 widget positions or in the case of Rocket Themes an almost infinite number of widget areas due to the use of the Gantry framework.

It is possible, though, to avoid the further expense, and in reality time, as these commercial themes do suffer from over complication sometimes. The solution still lies with Artisteer and a nifty little add-on package called Artisteer TT. TT stands for Templeteer and is provided by a separate organisation.

The TT add-on only works with the WordPress themes produced by Artisteer, however, it does add some great extra functionality to the theme that is missing from the original Artisteer product. For example the header image and WordPress site title and tag line are not easy to manipulate satisfactorily in Artisteer. By using the TT add-on it is possible to add widget areas in the header, change the Site Tite and tag line to a clickable image and many other multi-sidebar additions that make templateing/theming in WordPress so much easier.

However, and there is always a however, as with all time saving pieces of software the ruder more purist style website developer will turn their noses up at the way the code and the CSS in particular is generated. It is heavily bloated but it has to be to cope with the different browsers that this software has to deal with. Of course once the theme has been exported as a Wordress theme it is very simple to edit the CSS to suit. But is is important and it is also important to note that most of the themes do not pass strict CSS or HTML testing. These days it isn’t quite so important, however, since the search engines do take account of the validity of the code it would be a good idea to validate it as much as possible before releasing the final theme version.

Author Eldred Curwen owns a Melbourne web design company and specialises in WordPress, Joomla and Drupal websites.

WordPress Logo © by Phil Oakley

The free hosted version also known as the.com version, is mostly used for blogging purposes and has limited features. The.org version requires users to upload the software to their own hosting provider. This particular version is mostly used to create websites. What was once making waves in the blogging world, is now a tool of preference for many website builders. So I thought I’d share my top 5 reasons for me giving this platform 2 thumbs up.

Ease of Use – WordPress can be easily installed on almost any web server. Small business owners are turning to WordPress because it is extremely user-friendly. Site owners can easily add pages, insert blog posts and other small changes with only the click of a button. WordPress has a dashboard, making it easy to navigate through and manage your website.

Themes – Designers love the fact that WordPress has so many themes that can easily be customized to fit the needs of their clients. There are hundreds of free themes available online. For business owners looking for a more exclusive theme, a web designer can be retained to design a theme based on the client’s requirements. These customized themes also make having a professional looking website more cost-effective for entrepreneurs. Having your designer customize your WordPress theme can knock hundreds and sometimes even thousands of dollars off their invoice.

Plugins – This is one of the greatest inventions since sliced bread. There are hundreds of plugins available for WordPress users. Plugins are tools that extend the functionality of your site. They allow you to do anything from adding contact forms to installing flash photo galleries.

SEO – Three words, Search Engine Optimization. This platform makes even the novice seem like an SEO expert. It takes very little effort to get indexed by search engines. WordPress helps you get better ranking by offering features like tagging your posts, adding categories, SEO plugins and sending pings.

Minimum to No Coding or Programming Skills – WordPress requires very little to no HTML or PHP knowledge.

WordPress is definitely taking over the nation, it’s a force to be reckoned with in the design world. I fought hard to stay loyal to my site, but in the end I was won over. Now that you have heard my reasons for choosing this platform, I’d love to hear why you chose WordPress.

Author: Trena Stubbs is the founder of Apex Virtual Academy. WordPress designers are charging anywhere from $299 to $699 for a 5 page website design and for an expert designer it takes about 3-5 hours to customize a site. Increase your revenue today by mastering WordPress. http://www.thevirtualassistantschool.com