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.

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