World Class WordPress Themes

October 15, 2009

 

Themes allow you to easily extend your WordPress based website or blog and make it look good. The advantages of using a pre-built theme are endless, some of which being time and cost. Choose a theme, upload it, tweak it a bit and you’re ready to roll.

Theme providers like Woothemes and OboxDesign allow you download pre-built themes at a superlow cost and they even allow you to reuse them. Doing design for a traditional website can cost you thousands, but using a pre-built theme will either cost you nothing or for the more sexier themes anything from $30-$100. The three themes below are examples of wordpress templates.

Key points to consider before choosing a theme:

1. Layout – people are using fairly standard layouts to navigating the web, look at the templates, they work. Dont go for anything outlandish, your users wont wont be able to navigate your site
2. Flash – websites built exclusively in flash are a disaster. Google and Bing will never find you. What’s the point of building a site if nobody can find it? That’s like having a postal address without a post code.
3. Clutter – don’t load every wordpress widget you can find, make sure the menu structure works nicely, only use ones that are essential.

Installing your custom template:

1. Get your theme (pay or not) and download it to your computer. It usually comes as a zip file (that’s fine)
2. Login to your WordPress Admin
3. Go to “Appearance” and “Add new themes” (red marker 1)

 

1. Click the ‘Upload’ button (marker 2)
2. Click ‘Browse’ and find your theme file (where you downloaded it to)
3. Click ‘Install Now’
4. If you are asked, please enter the FTP connection info and the hostname is your websites name eg. www.blognow.co.za (your FTP account details that came with your hosting account – For RSAWEB Customers –> you can get them from the webhosting section in the MyRSAWEB Control Panel)

 

1. It may take 2-3 minutes to complete. Then click ‘Activate’

 

1. Your theme is now installed! Check it out by going to your website. The www.Blognow.co.za demo looks like this:

 

1. Go and test out the new theme, add some content!

Look out for the next in the series of the “RSAWEB WordPress Tutorial Series 101” – you can follow us on Twitter or signup to receive emails when a new release is announced