When I switched themes to this In Business theme I forgot something - my newsletter subscription box. It’s back now so please sign up for the WordPress Guru Newsletter! Just look to the right and down a bit - it’s right there in the sidebar.

This is a good lesson in itself. When you change themes, not everything translates so it’s a good idea to make a checklist of everything on your old blog so you don’t forget to put it on your new blog. I talked about how the posts themselves aren’t a problem but everything in the sidebar needs to be checked.

When you deploy a new theme on a site that already has content you will probably need to modify it to personalize it for what you want to appear.  Notice that I changed Page 1 to About and inserted the path to my page in the href section of the code. You can see the difference if you look at Page 2. The href code that follows is simply “#”.

Click here to see code.

The video will show how to change Page 2 to Newsletter Archives. Until then - look around the files in Presentation, Theme Editor. Don’t be afraid to look at and think about the code. The people who write WordPress themes are generally very good at labeling sections in plain English so you can find what you want to change.

Here is our new theme. Check everything carefully to see if it looks ok and the links work. Let me know what you see that needs to be fixed.

BTW - This theme was installed by following the instructions in this post.

The theme is called In Business and I found it here.

Has everyone had time to check out the problems you might encounter when installing a new theme? I’ll leave this theme up for another day to give you more time to see what I mean.

Let me emphasize that this will NOT be a problem if you are putting up a new blog and don’t have posts yet. However, if you do have posts and you change themes, check every post and make sure your links still work.

The new theme I’ll put up tomorrow will point out another problem but one that is easily fixed if you look for it.

Technorati Tags: wordpress themes
Add to: | Technorati | Digg | del.icio.us | Yahoo | BlinkList | Spurl | reddit | Furl |

Who spotted the problem with the new theme? Remember that we switched from the default theme to a new theme after several posts were already here. This theme has a narrower center column for posting which is fine for text but notice the screenshot images. They are too big for this theme and are cut off.

We have two choices - fix the image size or pick a new theme. We’ll be picking a new theme so you can see how looking at the theme before it is installed can prevent some problems.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordpressthemes, blog, blogging platform
Add to: | Technorati | Digg | del.icio.us | Yahoo | BlinkList | Spurl | reddit | Furl |

It’s time to think about making your blog look good. Let’s explore other than the default theme. If you are hosting your blog at WordPress you have a limited number of themes to choose from. If you are hosting your WordPress blog on your host, your choices are nearly unlimited.

For hosting on WordPress just go to the Presentation section in the Dashboard and scroll down the page to see the themes available to you. Click on the one you like and it’s automatically now your default theme. You can see if you really like it by clicking View site.

If you are hosting your own WordPress blog it’s a bit more complicated but well worth it. You can spend hours looking at themes. Here are some sites to find themes:

• WordPress Codex
• WordPress Themes
• Kaushal Sheth Themes
• WordPress Featured Themes
• Themes at Wordpress

When you find a theme you like, click on download and put it on your desktop. It will be a zipped file. When the download finishes click on the downloaded folder on your desktop and look on th left side of the open Explorer window. You will see Extract All Files. Click that to unzip the files you downloaded. The extract utility will put the unzipped files in a folder with the same name but unzipped. Open that folder and see if there is a readme.txt file. If there is, click on it to open it to look for special install instructions.

If you don’t see special install instructions, use an FTP client to access your host web server, upload your theme directory to wp-content/themes directory on your server. After the upload is complete you should see your theme in wp-content/themes/yourthemename.

Login to your Admin Panel, click on Presentation and you should see your new theme as available. Click on it and it will say that it is now the default theme. Click on view site to see it in all its glory!

Next time we’ll go over the FTP client just in case some of you don’t know how to use it. Once it’s explained, it will be easy so don’t worry.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, blogging, blogging platform, blog
Add to: | Technorati | Digg | del.icio.us | Yahoo | BlinkList | Spurl | reddit | Furl |