Themes are WordPress’s version of a DreamWeaver Template, in a way.

They provide a manner to display content on the website, by using a combination of PHP and CSS. The PHP controls the displaying of different elements of the WordPress site, while the CSS controls the Look and Feel.

Literally thousands of themes exists for WordPress. Some are Free – while others you have to purchase. Commercial themes may run anywhere from a few dollars to hundreds of dollars, depending upon the size, complexity, and support offered by the developer.

We will look at adding a free theme from WordPress.org.

Hover over the Appearance Tab of your WordPress website, and click the menu option for themes.

This will show you all of the themes that you currently have installed in your instance of WordPress. While you can have multiple themes, only one can be active at a time.

To add a new theme, click the Add New button. This will take you to a page where you can search for new themes to download from WordPress.org.

wordpress new theme search You can type in a word that you want to find. It will search the available themes, and their descriptions. You can use the filter to narrow your search. For example, only wanting to find Responsive Layouts that have two columns; or some other criteria you may have.

Clicking on the search button will bring you your results. There could be none that match your criteria, to over a thousand. These will be dynamically loaded from WordPress.org, with more displaying as you scroll further down the list.

wordpress themes returned Depending upon the size of your monitor, you will see a grid layout with several rows, like the one you see above.

wordpress theme install optionsUnder each theme you will see three links. These will let you install the theme now (you will need to later activate it), see a preview of the theme, and view details about the theme. Some theme authors have very detailed information, while others provide very little details about their theme.

Find the WordPress theme you like, and click Install Now. Then return to the main theme page. Select the Activate link for the theme you wish to use.

Or Watch on YouTube

 

How To Add a Theme in WordPress from WordPress.Org was originally found on Access 2 Learn

Assistant Professor

Walter Wimberly is an Assistant Professor at a regional college in Tennessee, teaching Computer Science in the Software Engineering track. He works as a student advisor, oversees curriculum changes, develops new courses, and manages the advisory panel.
Walter taught full time for about 7 years, before going back into “industry” as a full stack Software Developer for a dozen years. There he focused on web based projects coding in JavaScript/jQuery and utilizing the Bootstrap CSS Framework on the front-end, and coding in PHP, ASP/ASP.Net, SQL on the back-end.

Since he loves teaching, he taught as an adjunct web and digital media classes for eight (8) years, while working in industry, and has since returned to teaching full time.

He has been married for over 25 years, and is father to several special needs boys. As such, he is working on some projects to help others who have special needs to be self-sufficient, and support the care givers of those with special needs. Check out his Autism blog for more info.

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