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Chapter Seven. Make Your Website Pop wit... > Installing a Downloaded Theme
Installing a Downloaded Theme
Another way for you to make your site look different is to download a template from a theme design service. In this example, we are going to install a photography-centric theme called Candid from the folks over at Shooter Themes (who were nice enough to provide this for free for us) to experiment with. Using our basic WordPress skills, we should be able to get it up and running in no time!
Step One. | There are tons of online theme design companies out there to choose from and one that I’m really happy with is Shooter Themes. These guys are working on turning out WordPress themes specifically for people into photography. Whether you want to blog or not, the themes are designed to use a lot of the built-in functionality of WordPress. They were also nice enough to give us one of the themes they are going to be selling to use here. First, we’ll be installing the Candid theme (you can see my finished website with it here), and you can download it from the book’s download website (mentioned in the book’s introduction). |
Step Two. | Once you have the zip file for the theme on your desktop, log back into the admin page of your website, click on the Appearance button on the left and choose Themes. You’ll notice that at the top there are two tabs: Manage Themes and Install Themes. Click on the Install Themes tab where you can upload the file right into the directory it belongs in on your website. Click on Upload at the top of the tab, then click the Choose File button. Navigate to the zip file you downloaded, choose it, and click the Open button. Click the Install Now button, and WordPress will upload, unzip, and install the theme. Tip: Installing Via FTP If you want to use an external FTP client to install your theme, you’ll need to extract the folder inside of the zip file and upload it to your server. The theme is placed in the themes folder, which is located inside of the wp-content folder. I find it so much easier to upload themes and images using an FTP client, so that’s what I do most of the time. (Note: Using FTP is not as hard as you may think. If you’re interested, check out the lesson on it in Chapter 11. In just a few pages you’ll be flying with it!) |
Step Three. | Once the theme is installed on your website, you’ll have the option of previewing the theme or activating it. Since we know this is what we want, let’s just go ahead and click on Activate.
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