Part 8 – Playing around with themes

Using the theme we have been using so far notice how the posts take the front space of the website and other stuff such as details of posts, comments and meta data are below the posts. A reader would have to scroll the webpage to access them. Wouldn’t it be nice if these could go on a sidebar as it is on my blog https://subashsl.com  The solution is actually pretty simple. All we need to do is to change to a theme that has the sidebar on the side. Choosing and changing a theme is simple. 

1.   Click on Themes from the Appearance menu on the left of your dashboard.  There is also a Themes link on the panel directly below Bluehost (Image below). This is explained in the note below the image.

Note:  Clicking the Themes from the Appearance menu refreshes the webpage to display the themes that can be imported and the currently activated theme. You can also click Themes from under Bluehost refreshes the page to display themes that can be purchased for a price. We’ll look into that later. 

2.   Scroll down the webpage where you can see the following image to add a new Theme.

3.   Click on Add New Theme. The webpage refreshes to display the following themes. 

Note:  Here you can browse and search for hundreds of free themes and preview them. To search enter keywords (a word or phrase related to your blog, business or website) in the Search field and press Enter. To preview a theme that is listed just hover your mouse over the tile of the Theme and click the Details and Preview button that appears. (check above image for Details and Preview button on one of the Themes)

4.   Search (using keywords in the search field) and browse for themes, preferably one with a sidebar or one you like for your website.

Note:  Search for free ones. Under Premium are the paid ones. By the way, you can get lost in them. There are so many of them. Then there are those that are available outside of the WordPress dashboard too, for instance if you search for them in Google.

For the example I search for the term “blog” in the search field and I come across the following Theme I would like to use, The Bootstrap Theme.

5.   Click Details & Preview to preview the theme. Hover the mouse over the theme to display the button. The webpage refreshes to display how the theme looks in the browser’s window.

Note:   There are several things you can do on this page. Click Install to install the theme. Click the ‘X‘ button on the top left to go back to the search results. Click the ‘<‘ or ‘>‘ buttons to preview the other themes in list of the results.

5.   Click Install and after Activate is displayed after installation completes, click Activate.

6.   View the new look of your website by clicking Visit site from under your blogname on the dashboard.  This is on the top left of your dashboard. Right click and select Open link in a new tab to view your site in a new tab.

The webpage refreshes or opens in a new tab to reveal the new look of your site usign the latest theme you installed and activated.

Note:  At this state there are a couple of things to be borne in mind.

1.  To give your site that unique identity you could modify the them using the Customizer. Remember it was a free theme that we downloaded. You can change basic colours, colours of the fonts, change the fonts etc., but not all of the theme. Modifying a theme also depends how much that theme allows one to modify it. When I explain the other theme to be used the Customzer will become more familiar.

2.  You could go in for a paid theme and then modify that theme too similarly. Here too, how much you can modify a paid theme depends on the theme itself. 

3.  For the ultimate flexibility in theme modification you could go for a Theme Builder as I have done on all my websites including this one. I use the Divi theme and with Divi not only can you modify the layouts and Pre-Defined Themes that come with it but also create an alltogether new theme. You could also make and sell themes if you want to. 

(to be continued…)