Part 5 – Downloading the starter templates

In this topic you’ll learn how to download the starter templates plugin for the Astra theme using which you can build your webpages and posts.

1.   Select Plugins from the menu on the left in your dashboard and select Add New.

The webpage refreshes to display the following search field.

2.   Enter astra starter templates in the search field and press Enter.  

The following plugins are displayed.

3.   Click on Install Now of the Starter Templates….  plugin. The installation begins and in a few seconds the installed notification is displayed.

4.   Click Starter Templates from the Appearance menu as shown below.

A list of templates are displayed. We’ll be using them to create our webpages and posts. Note the Elementor template editor at the top right corner of the page displaying the templates. 

Since I am planning to create a website for teaching Technical Writing I am going to search for templates on courses.

5.   Enter the type of website / webpage / blog you like to create in the Search field. For e.g. I search for “blog” and the following results are obtained.

6.   Click on your desired template. The webpage refreshes to display more details of the template. In my case more details of the Own Style with Kara template that has the template for 3 separate pages.

You can always go back to the search results by clicking the back button. 

Note:  By the way the templates that have the “AGENCY” tag on the top right corner of the template are paid ones. They offer more templates but for now the free ones are great for starting out.

7.   Preview the template by clicking on it. The webpage refreshes to show you the template in detail.

8.   Click Preview ‘Fashion Lifestyle Blog’ Site to preview the template in a new tab of your browser. Feel free to click the links to the Blog and Contact pages.

9.   Click Import Complete Site to import the sample site and pages to your domain. We’ll edit these pages to suit your blog or website. The following message box is displayed.

10.  Click Import. The following message boxes are displayed. Plugins, widgets required for the template are also installed.

11.  Click View Site to preview your site in another tab.

Note: Your site still hasn’t been published. So the preiew is only to confirm that the template has been imported. We’ll tweak it to suit your website soon.

12.  Click the close button symbol of the Imported Successfully message box by clicking the close button on the top right of the box.

Next – Tweaking the template to create your website or blog (Coming soon!)