Now we have reached a fully working wordpress installation. So, let’s make it look as it should. Remember that when your design was chosen, in the website you did your search, the design should have a wordpress version compatibility note. For example, the original design applied to this website you are reading was 2.7, meaning that the version for wordpress you should installed is 2.7. Please don’t disregard this recommendation.

First: Download your theme of choice
To install a wordpress theme, we will need to download it first. There are thousands of themes in the web, and in our personal wordpress template store we carry some of the best. A wordpress theme is a set of files usually compressed in a single zip file. It has a style.css file containing the name (unique to the directory), tags, version (in the format of x.x or x.x.x and be unique to the theme) and classes: .alignright, .alignleft, .aligncenter (see http://codex.wordpress.org/CSS for more details). It includes a screenshot file, screenshot.png, and be a real screenshot of the theme, not a splash screen. A GPL compatible license. It exposes RSS feeds, it support Gravatars and widgets, it shows (usually in side bars) post categories and tags, the blog title and tag line.

Once downloaded, the files should be extracted into a directory under the themes name. For exmaple, if the theme is called “theme 987″ then the directory for the files should be ”theme 987″.

Second: Upload the theme directory to WordPress
With your ftp file transfer program of choice (please see our previous post for a recommendation), upload the decompressed directory into /wp-content/themes/ directory. This should leave you with something like a /wp-content/themes/theme987 directory.

Third: Activate the theme within your WordPress admin panel

Wordpress Theme Selection

Login to your WordPress admin panel, and navigate to the Presentation tab. In the center you will find the “Current Theme”. This is the theme wordpress is configured to use right now. Below it, the list of “Available Themes”. These themes are themes you can use but aren’t configured as “Current” right now. To activate our desired theme simply click on any miniature in the list. The theme will enlarge and in the top right angle of the screen an activation link will present itself. To continue please press this link. Once this is done, this selected theme will turn into the “Current Theme” and if you go to your wordpress site (leave the administration area) will see your newly chosen theme.

If you don’t like this option, you can still change this theme anytime with the same process described in this third part of the article.

to continue to  ”Website Development With WordPress: Making wordpress Search Engine Friendly” please click here.