Guide: Configuring your wordpress theme

Once you have wordpress installed you will no doubt want to alter the theme layout, ensure it is displaying your own logo, and generally rearrange widgets, menus and other aspects of your site.

In this tutorial, I will be setting up theme for my new niche site TVTycoonGames.com.  I have always had a somewhat strange passion for simulation games in which you manage or run a television station.  There are only a handful of games out there, and I’ve never seen a centralized list of them all before.  I thought I would create a small review site, and my keyword research seemed to show these keywords were the best available given the number of searches compared to the competition for these keywords.  I will post a tutorial on keyword research using Market Samurai in future.

1. Finding Your WordPress Theme

There are many wordpress themes available – mostly paid, but quite a few free ones.  While I plan to use the free theme AdCents in this tutorial, I feel I should just give a quick few words of warning when it comes to using free themes-

If you are planning on seeking out a paid theme, you can pick them up relatively cheaply, and there are several options for doing so.  First, you could have a completely custom theme designed through a service like oDesk, or 99designs.  Alternatively, you can utilize professionally designed themes, which although not custom, are less likely to be found on 25,000 other websites, like some of the free themes.  These themes can generally be purchased either individually, or by joining a template club (with a monthly or yearly fee) which gives you access to all of that company or designers themes.

2. Installing Your WordPress Theme

Step 2A: Once you’ve found the wordpress theme you want to use, or test – and have downloaded the zip or rar file of the theme you want to use attempt to unzip or unrar the file.  If it simply unrars a folder, which contains (either in it or in a single subfolder) a bunch of php files and other folders such as ‘css’, ‘images’ ‘includes’ and so forth, then you can simply upload the file you have unzipped.  However, if the zip file contains more zip files then you will need to upload the zip file which includes the ‘css’ ‘images’ ‘includes’ and other folders as well as the themes php files (such as header.php, index.php etc).  Sometimes, the other zip files may contain things like the themes image source files, so that you can use these to edit the theme – but that is getting a bit complex for this tutorial.

Step 2B: Making sure you have found the right zip file to upload, log in to your wordpress administration dashboard – likely at yourdomain.com/wp-admin/.  Once logged in, select ‘Appearance’ from the left hand pannel, then ‘Themes’.  Now, from the top tabs choose ‘Install Theme’, which will probably be grayed-out.  Under that tab, will be the options ‘Search’, ‘Upload’, ‘Featured’ etc, from which you should select Upload.  Then hit ‘Browse’, select the correct zip file ascertained in Step 2A, and then click ‘Install Now’.

With any luck, you won’t have received any errors – if you did it is possible you did not obtain the right zip file outlined in Step 1, the zip file is corrupted, or the theme is perhaps incompatible with the version of wordpress you are running.  Click ‘Activate’.  Now, your current theme should be displayed, with ‘OPTIONS’ including ‘widgets’, ‘menus’ and perhaps a third option – ‘theme settings’ or something to that effect.  If you do have a theme settings option, click on that now

Step 2C (depending on your theme):  Most, but not all themes include at least a basic theme options page.  If it includes this it will appear within the administration pannel in one of a few likely places.  This may appear under the Appearance menu on the left-hand pannel, or an entirely new menu option may be created.  Alternatively, the theme options page can usually (but not always) be accessed via Appearance > Themes, where under the current theme it lists the options available.

Depending on the complexity of this theme options/setup page, you may be able to enter the URL or upload a new logo image, set the Alt text and in the fancier themes even alter the style, colors and layout quite dramatically.

Because this options page varies depending on the theme, it is essentially impossible to write a guide that is applicable to all of them.   Generally, the options are relatively self-explanatory.  However, where something is not made clear, you can always play around with the settings – save them – then explore the frontend of your site and take note of the changes (if any).

3. Integrating your Logo into the theme

There are several approaches to including your logo in the wordpress theme, and modifying the theme so that it displays your logo.  Here are the three approaches, with the easiest and fastest methods appearing first.

First, if your theme does have a theme settings page, the logo image can often be either uploaded, or the URL to the image file can be entered to quickly update the logo.  Sometimes, you may also be able to update the favicon .ico file.  The favicon is the small icon displayed next to your site’s address in the address bar, left of the page title in your browser tabs, and also appears next to the page title in your bookmarks.  You can easily convert a gif or png image file to a .ico using this handy tool.

This is the approach that worked using the free AdCents theme for my niche site TVTycoonGames.com.

Second, if you can locate the image of the logo displayed by default within the zip file you uploaded, then you can replace this within the zip file, or rezip the unzipped file structure.  Then reupload the theme (after removing it if you have already installed it).  Alternatively, using an FTP tool (I use Core FTP LE), you can browse to wp-content/themes/the-name-of-your-theme and replace (or overwrite) the default image.

Third, is probably a better approach to the second method, for SEO reasons.  By having the image of your logo named to include some of your core site keywords, this can improve SEO.  To do this, you must locate within the .php files of the theme where it calls for the default image to be displayed.  Thus, first find the files name.  Next, under Appearance > Editor select ‘Header.php’ from the right hand side.  Using your browsers search function enter the name of the default image.  If you have found it, replace the name with the name of your own logo file – upload the file to that location – and save your changes to the .php file.  However, this may not be located within header.php, and depends on the theme – some other obvious files to try are index.php, but you may have to go through and search the contents of each one.

Note, if your theme does not use a logo image by default, but rather uses text – this option may sometimes be changed within the theme’s settings page.  Alternatively, in some themes this can only be changed by editing the .php files.

4. Configuring Your Footer

In your footer you may want to include a number of things, from a copyright notice to links to various pages – such as your about page or privacy policy.  Depending on the theme you are using, this can be achieved in a number of ways.

First, from within the theme option menu a footer option may be available allowing you to insert HTML code for your copyright notice – and even (if there is enough room) – a few links you could write in HTML if you are familiar with this or using something like an online demo of tinymce to create the html code for you.

Second, if the theme has a footer widget or any widget that appears in the footer area (irrespective of its name) you may place widgets in this area to create your footer.  You can use a simply ‘Text’ widget to insert text for your copyright notice, or links.  Alternatively, there may be a different area for you to place links in a widget – which can be achieved using either a ‘custom menu’ widget, a ‘links’ widget or again simple HTML code inside a ‘text’ widget.

Third, and as a last resort – a footer can usually be added by editing the footer.php file.  This can be done within wordpress from the ‘Editor’ link on the left menu, nder Appearance.  It may take some fiddling to work out where in the footer.php file you will need to place your code.

5. Other things to note-

Using ‘Links’ to create menus and links

This is not the preferred method for creating menus, but is another option.  Within ‘links’ create a category, and then create links associated with that category.

Now from within Widgets (under appearance), add a ‘links’ widget, and select the category you just created and associated links to.  You should be able to move the widget to various widget areas (depending on your theme) and have the links display on diferent places on the page.

Using ‘Menus’ to create menus and links

The newer versions of wordpress come with a built-in menu system.  From the menus screen (under appearance) create a new menu.  Ensuring the tab for the menu you just created is selected, add some links to the menu from the left.  Now save your menu.

From within Widgets (under appearance) drag a new ‘custom menu’ widget to one of the widget areas on the right.  Now within the custom widget’s settings select the menu you just created and click save.  The menu should now be viewable on your webpage.