WordPress Beginner: Themes

Name: WordPress Beginner: Themes
Author: Chrissy Rey

Learn how to change the appearance of your WordPress website with themes

Preview the first lesson free — get full access to all 3 lessons.

Course: On-Demand

Hello, my name is Christy Ray and in these lessons you will learn how to install community themes, how to install premium themes, and how to configure themes after you've installed them. Themes are what control the appearance of your WordPress website. So right now, if I was to go to my site and visit it, I can see this is what my site looks like. And it's currently using a theme called 2023, which looks like this. It's pretty plain, pretty boring, but that's what it looks like. And if you were to change your theme it would change the appearance of the website. Now, to install a theme you need to go to the WordPress Dashboard and then go to the Appearance menu. And when you click on that that's going to take you into the Themes screen. And you can see here that I've got three themes installed. I've got 2023, 2021, and 2022. You always wanna make sure that you keep one of these installed. It doesn't matter really which one, I usually leave the most recent one installed, but you wanna install one of these. These are called the default themes. They're the ones that are managed by the WordPress Foundation. So the people that manage wordpress.org, they're going to manage these themes as well. Now, if you need to delete a theme you can just click on the theme. So for example, I'm going to leave 2023, but I'm gonna delete 2021 and 2022. So you can just click on the Theme Details and in the Theme Details screen, you can click on Delete. That's gonna take that theme out. So you can see it disappears. I'm gonna do the same thing for the 2022 theme, so let's delete that one. And again, I am going to keep the 2023 theme, that's important. Now I'm going to add a new theme. So to do that, I will click on the Add New button and that's going to give me the free WordPress theme directory. And there are thousands, you can see there's 5,316 themes in the theme repository. So there are lots of themes in there and you can install any of these for free. Some of them are similar to the plugins, they're freemium. So while you can install it for free, some of them have pro or premium add-ons that they're going to prompt you to install in order to get more features or more templates or more options of any type. Now, when you're going to search for a theme there is a Feature Filter. So if I click on Feature Filter. It's really limited, so for example, you can search for blogs or e-commerce or you can go by features. I like to do Accessibility Ready when possible. It's really important to keep your website accessible. And so I'm gonna just apply the filters and search for accessibility ready themes. So we can see these are the accessibility ready themes. I'm not really loving any of them. So we're gonna edit the filters and take that one out, apply the filters, and go back to the original themes. Let's go back to Popular here. So it's really important to take a look at the different themes and figure out which one you like. There are a lot of options, and you can see here that I've got 2023, 2022, there's 2017. A lot of the popular ones are the themes that come installed with WordPress by default. Another one we've got here is, Hello Elementor. This is a very popular theme that's why it's all the way up here at the top. And that one, when you install it, it's built to work with something called a theme editor or a visual theme editor. And the visual editor is called Elementor and it allows you to drag and drop the different parts of your website. I don't usually like to use visual editors because in a lot of cases, if you're, especially if you're a beginner, then they tend to make the website, the files very large, they make the code very large, which means that it takes a long time to download and the user experience isn't as good. But if you wanna use it, then you can install that and use that. This time, I am going to install OceanWP. Let's look at this one. This might look a little bit different, so we'll click on Install and let's see what this one looks like. So we'll install it. And again, we need to activate it after it's installed. And it's good before you really get into adding all of the content to your website, look around, find a theme that you like. So we're gonna activate this one. And you can Install and Activate Ocean Extra, so sometimes when you install a theme it's going to ask you to install a plugin or plugins. So I'm not gonna do that right now. I'm just gonna click on Visit Site and take a look. And you can see this looks different. I've got this sidebar over here, so it looks a bit different with that. But it still doesn't look great. It doesn't look the way that I want it. So if you wanted to make it look a little fancier, you might need to install a plugin or theme like Inspiro. So let me install that one. And I'm not advocating for a specific theme, I want you to play around with these, poke around, and see which theme is going to work the best for you. But let's click on this one. We're gonna activate that. This one does require several plugins, so we're not gonna install that just yet. I wanna see what it looks like without installing those plugins. So we'll visit the sites and it looks very different. Look at that. So this might work a little bit better for me than some of the other themes, because it's a little easier to make some dramatic changes to it. So if you click back, now if I refresh this, we can see which theme is active. So Inspiro or Inspiro is the currently active one. And if I wanted to, if I decided that I didn't wanna use Astra or OceanWP, then just like we saw before, you can delete them. When you install a theme that does require plugins, so you can see this one says it requires specific plugins. You should probably install them to get it to really work correctly. And you can see this one also recommends specific plugins. So if you're gonna add Instagram to your website or social icons, then you probably need to install those plugins. So just be aware that each of the themes that you install are going to be different, so keep that in mind. Thanks for watching. And stay tuned for the next lesson where you will learn how to install premium themes.

Beginner Provider : Chrissy Rey 3 Lessons · 20m in Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese

Course Description

A WordPress theme is a collection of PHP, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS code that controls the layout, fonts, colors, and much more. The WordPress developer community has created thousands of themes for you to choose from for your website. Many of the themes created by the developer community are free, but some themes are premium and require a paid license to use and update. After you install a theme, you can use the Customizer to change the logo, colors, fonts, and other settings and give your website a one-of-a-kind look that matches your brand.

In the Themes module, you will learn how to use themes to change the appearance of your WordPress website. First, you will learn how to install free community themes. Then you will learn how to install commercial premium themes. Finally, you will learn how to use the Customizer to change the settings after you install a theme.

What You'll Learn

Install a community (free) WordPress theme
Install a premium/commercial (paid) theme that requires a license
Configure a theme using the Customizer
Change a website's logo, colors, fonts, and other settings after installing a theme
Change the appearance and layout of a WordPress website using themes

Key Takeaways

A WordPress theme is a collection of PHP, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS code that controls a site's layout, fonts, colors, and more.
The WordPress developer community has created thousands of themes, many free and some premium that require a paid license to use and update.
After installing a theme, the Customizer can be used to change the logo, colors, fonts, and other settings to match a brand.
The course covers installing free community themes, installing commercial premium themes, and using the Customizer to configure theme settings.

Frequently Asked Questions

What will I learn in this course?

You will learn how to use themes to change the appearance of your WordPress website, including installing free community themes, installing commercial premium themes, and using the Customizer to configure theme settings.

What is a WordPress theme?

A WordPress theme is a collection of PHP, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS code that controls the layout, fonts, colors, and much more of your website.

Are WordPress themes free or paid?

Many themes created by the developer community are free, but some themes are premium and require a paid license to use and update.

What can I change with the Customizer?

After you install a theme, you can use the Customizer to change the logo, colors, fonts, and other settings to give your website a look that matches your brand.

Which lessons are included in this module?

The module includes three lessons: Installing Community Themes, Installing Premium Themes, and Configuring a Theme.