WordPress: How To Change Your Blog Theme

A Word Of Caution About Changing Your Blog Theme…

This is the single biggest place where new bloggers get stuck. I strongly recommend that you focus your energy on writing good content first and foremost.

Recommended: Go with a solid WordPress blog hosting service like BlogPress and stay with the default theme, add at least 10 posts and 1 static page, set up your categories and menus, and only then consider changing your theme.

This serves 2 purposes.

1. The search engines do not care about your blog theme as long as it’s well-coded.

They care about content, so the faster you can publish a lot of good content, the faster your blog will get listed in the search engines. If you spend weeks (or even months as some do) trying to make your blog look perfect, you’ve wasted that valuable time that could have been spent publishing content.

The only time search engines care about your theme is when it’s poorly coded and causes your site to have lots of errors and a slow load time.

2. Your new blog theme will look much better when there is content on your blog.

It’s really hard to preview a new theme on an empty blog – they all look bad when there’s no content, menus, or navigation.

Many themes offer a customizable home page, but with no content, what do you feature on the home page?

Take the time to set up your categories and publish at least 2-3 posts under each category so that you can see what a blog listing page will actually look like.

Take the time to at least write your About page so that you can see what a static page looks like.

The more content you have on your blog, the easier it will be to preview a new theme and see what it’s really going to look like.

How To Change To A New Blog Theme (WordPress)

Here’s how to change to a new theme in WordPress.

1. Log in to your dashboard
2. Select Appearance->Themes from the left menu
3. Scroll down to see the available  themes.
4. To activate a theme, click the activate link under the image. You may also preview the theme before activating it.

Note: All themes allow different levels of customization – header/logo, menus, background, etc. Once you have activated a new theme, you will see those options in the left menu of the dashboard listed under Appearance->Customize.

I’ve Changed My Theme But It Still Looks The Same

Sometimes when you make changes to the design of your blog (this includes theme changes, menus, and widgets), the changes do not immediately show up. This is normally caused by “caching” – a mechanism that stores your site’s files for faster retrieval. Caching makes your site faster, but can be frustrating when you’re making changes and want to see them immediately.

If you really must understand all the details, here’s a great tutorial on web caching.

The biggest culprit, however, is your browser.

Google Chrome is particularly good at caching the web pages you browse – that’s one of the things that make it so fast. The downside is when you’re doing css/style changes to your blogs theme – this includes changing the theme or its menus and sometimes when you are updating widgets or even pages.

The solution to this is to clear your browser’s cache (you may have to do this after every update) - http://www.wikihow.com/Clear-Your-Browser’s-Cache

There’s a nice little trick in Google Chrome to temporarily turn of the browser’s caching feature while you making updates to you theme. - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5690269/disabling-chrome-cache-for-website-development