The Publishers Den

Now that you have enabled your wordpress account scroll down to ‘Appearance’ in the left sidebar, open it up and select ‘add new themes’. No doubt you will probably spend a good chunk of time selecting a theme that is right for your site. So first, think about the main attributes of your site.

• Is your site going to be an e commerce site?
• Will you be using paypal?
• Are you offering a service?
• Are you offering merchandise?
• Is it an informational site?
• Is it a multi-users blog?
• Is it just for fun?
• Are you promoting your business?
  Is it for school?

You should ask yourself these questions while picking your theme so that you get one that has the right functions. Though a lot of the themes come with their own plugins, you can always choose the plugins you want manually. When selecting a theme, I am mostly concerned with it’s functions and then its appearance. I wouldn’t necessarily choose a bubble gum theme if the content of my site is about carpet.

After you have chosen the theme that you want

• select install
• the theme will be saved in your ‘themes’ section under ‘appearance’.
• you can preview it or activate it. Sometime the preview doesn’t really reflect what your site will actually look like so activate it and then visit your site to see what it actually looks like.

Before I forget, be sure to have your log in available or to save the dashboard of your site for easy access. If you don’t then the only way you will be able to get into the dashboard is through the server or through wordpress.org. Either way, I think it is a pain in the butt.

It use to be that you could only upload themes, plugins, pictures etc… through an ftp server in which case you would have had to download the theme or plugin or whatever, unpack the zip file, go into your ftp server and upload it. Now most of it can be done right in your dashboard and there are a few things you would need to log into your server for: backups, uploading pictures into your themes, making files for things like Analytics, verifying you are the site owner for Webmaster tools etc. but we will get to that in a bit.

So for now, fumble around for a while deciding on the theme that is right for you and then let’s move on to plugins. Don’t worry about the pictures contained in the themes, you can always change them later. However, one theme that I would suggest is the Atahualpa Wordpress Theme because it has the most customizable options and it makes it very easy to insert SEO information without having to access your server and create new files.