Choosing a WordPress Theme

Choosing a WordPress Theme is the basis for the opening page of your website. It is important to look at the setup of many themes to see what aligns with the vision you have for your webpage. If you don’t know yet how you want to set up your website, you make want to take some time on the WordPress site and look over the many themes that are available and think about what layouts appeal most to you.

To help you envision what I am talking about, I will use my own example. Each theme is given a name to identify it. The one that I chose was called the Haxel theme. Mostly I was drawn to the image and clean lines on the page.

I did not think about how my material would need to fit into the structure of this theme. Once I began to understand how WordPress worked, I found that I didn’t like how my menu items were hidden by the flower picture. What I didn’t realize at the time though was that you can setup where your blogs, posts, etc show up on your web page by going into your dashboard.

• Open your dashboard
• Go to Appearance
• Open Widgets
• Drag and Drop (hold left mouse clicker on the widget and slide your mouse over to location you want widget and release
• Drag the widgets in the order you want to see them.
• Delete any you don’t want. They are always available to drag back.

In the picture above, you will see that I opted to put my blog roll “widget” and search engine on the Right Sidebar. A widget is simply an embedded tool that helps you to accomplish a task. In this case, the task was to load my blogs in a rolldown fashion on my webpage. There are many widget options. Here is a fun page to look at that will help you to start envisioning how widgets can work for you.

Besides the Right Sidebar but you can also choose from the, Left, Header, Business and Comment Sidebars.

This is the theme that I ended up using. Notice how the image for this theme fills the entire width across the top of the page.

I didn’t realize that by using the below up close head shot of my pup that it would fill the whole space. I thought that the picture would be smaller it fills the space that was created for that theme to hold a picture.

As cute as the original picture was, it didn’t like the blurry up close look so I took a picture that was at a distance and it fit across the page like this. There is a technique you can do to create a blank picture the size of your header and put your smaller picture into that space but I will not be describing how to do that today.

I was able to give you the above samples by easily changing the appearance of my Header Media through the dashboard in WordPress. To try this yourself, all you need to do is open your dashboard and follow these menu options:

1) Appearance

2) Customize

3) Header Media

4) Add New Image

5) Upload Files or Media if you already have a picture uploaded

6) Choose Picture

7) Crop it so only what you want shows

8) Publish it

9) If you don’t like it, don’t panic, redo the above steps

Final Thoughts

• Take some time to look at other websites to see what you like
• Choose the Theme that best works for you
• Go into your dashboard and start creating!