How to set up new theme for your blog?

You’ve set up your WordPress blog either of these two methods I mentioned in earlier posts:

• How to install WordPress via Fantastico De Luxe?
• How to install WordPress via FTP or FileManager?

Now, its time to give your blog a nice and elegant look.

Separating content and look, modern CMS and blogging platform has made the live damn easier. It is theme in WordPress that controls the look and feel of your blog. You can change the design, layout and the overall look of your blog at any time without worrying the contents a bit. That’s where I’m so crazy about WordPress indeed.

In this post, I’ll show you how easily you can change theme so that it looks cool and justifies your content!

OK, I’m looking for a nice and elegant theme that offers me lot of useful features. Let me google ‘elegant wordpress theme’. Google is so smart – it always gives me what is best instantly. Among the results it listed, I’m gone to ‘http://www.elegantwpthemes.com/’.

Browsing through the page, I prefer ‘Elegant Watches’. Download it here if you wish to test yourself.

I liked this theme because:

• It is FREE! You don’t expect me to buy one for tutorial purpose
• XHTML 1.0 Transitional – Why? Go read Montego Musings to find out.
• Adsense Ready – Why not to make a few dollars?
• Threaded comments support – This is one of the most useful. It will be easy to track the comments and replies.
• FeedBurner subscribe via email support – Building list is very important for your blogging experience. FeedBurner helps great to circulate your posts automatically to your subscribers whether via feedreader or email. Great feature!
• A lot of advertising spots 125×125 – After you blog is bit popular and your Alexa and PageRank become demonstrable, there will be lots of advertisers interested. These spots are highly beneficial to have.

Well, did you download the them? I did.

Install Elegant Watches Theme

Before we start to change the look and feel of our blog, let’s see how it currently looks so that it will be easier later to realize the changes:

Log on to the WordPress backend – the dashboard. You can enter yourdomain/wp-admin in title bar to get log on screen.

Supply username and password and hit log on.

Look at the left panel in your dashboard page.

Under Appearance group you’ll find that Themes. Click it.

I hope you can easily follow the steps in Image. You need to make total 4 clicks – Appearance >> Themes >> Install Themes and then Upload (because we’ve already downloaded Elegant Watches theme).

You can search themes using search or the other links like Features, Newest, Recently Updated etc. But I prefer searching for theme outside, read for reviews, check features and download the theme. Then I come here to uplaod that theme and activate it.

After you click Upload link, you’ll be given this form to select your theme and upload. Click ‘Choose File’ button, browse for theme file in your computer (where you had downloaded) and then click ‘Install Now’.

It will take a few moments to upload the zip file you’ve downloaded. If you are using Google Chrome, you can see the progress at status bar below.

Great! the theme is uploaded and installed correctly. Now you need to activate this theme to apply. Click on that ‘Activate’ link. Done!

How it looks now?

Lets look how the new look applied to our blog!

Is it not damn great? I know, there are lots of empty spaces – but we have not added any content yet. It will rock when posts and other contents are added. Anyway, we build up a professional looking and full of featured foundation.

Keep following, I’m gona show you everything.