In the OLDEN days of the web, we had to hard code html for our pages, and if we wanted a website, we had to copy the look and feel of the site over and over so the pages looked consistent.
Then we got various programs like Dreamweaver, Adobe Golive, etc that really allowed us to organize and template the sites we were building. But they were clunky, and it was hard to do good SEO in them. But it was all we had, and we liked it and made it work. There are still times I use straight html and Dreamweaver, but rarely and only with lots of coffee and aspirin .
The along came WordPress, and other Content Management Systems (CMS) which allowed us to use database and PHP MYSQL to build sites. The problem was you needed to be able to build, have built or customize the “theme” which was the look and feel of your site. Imagine you have a magazine with all the pretty art, but now words but place savers for the art and content. Then when the person picks up the magazine it magically fills in with the content requested. That’s wordpress in a nutshell.
In our current time, we have an absolute abundance of free, paid and kind of free themes that we can use at will for wordpress. I mean lots of them. Just one little thing, they are not consistent due to being written by a lot of different people all over the world.
Some of them, like the one I use for this site, has an easy interface for me to change things without coding, but most do not.
So how do you find and pick themes? Just google WordPress themes, and start to look. Or go to the wordpress site here.. Find one you like and download it. I’ll cover how to install wordpress themes and plugins in a video in the coming lessons.
What’s important is to find themes that you like, and learn to move around in the individual theme. Each theme has a little different set up, and I find that I use 5-10 regularly for my work and niche marketing sites.
I’ll be adding more as time goes on, so check back.
Just think of themes as the templates for your site. The look and design. You can change them or get them changed to suit you by a coder, but we’ll cover that in a bit too.
For now, they are the carrier, the skeleton of your site.