A Walkthrough for Hooking Up Wordpress Themes

By Peter Lawlor

What is Wordpress? Why is it so famous? How could it really benefit me?

These are the questions running through the minds of many thousands of designers out there who have not tapped into this invaluable resource. Wordpress is the future of your web design world. It is what empowers freelance designers to meet tight deadlines and not die of stress when it comes to new and complicated manageable functionality. It is what gives so many an edge over the masses and enables us as designers to work faster and better.

If it's this valuable, how do I get it? How much does it cost me in the means of time and effort?

It costs nothing in the way of price, and minimal in the way of time learning to use it, with unparalleled dividends. How to get it is simple: Go to http://wordpress.org/ and go to the download section. Get the zip file, and read the directions for how to mount it. More or less this is the process:

Go to the directory where you have your site, and upload the unzipped package of the Wordpress files. Nextly, open example.com/wp-admin/ in your internet browser of choice. This will walk you through as simple form of installing some simple things for your Wordpress site. One it says that Wordpress works, you can go to your dashboard and get a feel for it. Now comes to uploading your work to it. Add your XHTML, CSS, etc. (the entire site you have made) to a folder in a subdirectory called wp-content. You will see other premade themes that come with Wordpress already there. Create a directory for your own Wordpress theme, and upload it.

Then go back to the wp-content folder. Go into another one of the theme directories, and go to their CSS file. You will see at the top a section with some info. It will be inside of some "/* */" brackets. Copy and paste this into the top of your CSS file, and change the info to feature your info. From there, go back to your Wordpress dashboard, and go to the sidebar. Go to appearance, themes, and click. You will see your theme with no picture as one of the options. Click activate, and presto, you're ready to go.

From this point, the sky is the limit as to what you can do with Wordpress. There are many hundreds of plugins, add-ons, and tricks that will take you into your future with this design style. You can make any style, any type of site, and have it fully content manageable so that you can leave it to the client ready to use.

Wordpress can be used for so many things including e-commerce sites, photo blog functions, social networks, SEO optimization, and so many more things. Learning how to use it, accessing your files through it, and so much more is within your reach as you use it for your advantage. You will see in no time at all that Wordpress is perfect for you and your needs.

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Next, buy StudioPress WordPress themes, or buy Genesis themes to get access to some of the best premium themes.