Choosing and Installing a Theme
So what is WordPress theme? Before installing and choosing theme, we need to make sure that we know what theme is and how important it is for site presentation.
Theme is a collection of stylesheets and templates used to make your site presentable and will define the appearance of the WordPress websites. WordPress provides free and paid themes, you can navigate to wordpress.org to see a large collection of free themes.
Each themes comes with different features, layout, and designs. You can choose whatever you like depends on your preference that will suit your taste and category your site in. There are those that are designed to serve specific kind of websites, in wordpress.org you can search themes based on categories.
Parent and Child Theme
Parent theme in WordPress is a theme that is declared parent by a child theme. Parent theme makes it easier for designers and developers to do more modifications and take advantage of the WordPress themes by creating a child theme. A parent theme passes all its functionality, features, and style to child theme. This is a safe method since you can just modify the child theme without affecting or changing the parent theme.
Most WP beginners confused parent themes with theme framework. We can say that all WordPress theme frameworks are parent themes but not all parent themes are theme frameworks. All WP themes can be parent theme, in order to convert them to parent theme it needs to offer the ability for designers to modify and customize the core functionality of the theme without modifying any of the core theme files. This process usually done by using filters and hooks.
Child theme as mentioned above inherits all the functionality, features, and style of the parent theme. Child theme is the safest way to modify WordPress theme without touching the parent or the core theme files. No need to worry about the updating the parent theme, once parent theme is updated all changes in the child theme are preserved and applied on the updated version as well. For that reason, child theme are commonly use and safest way to make changes to an existing theme. Rather than changing core files, you can simply override the templates via child theme.
If you don’t want any of the offered themes, you can just simply create your own themes using Page Builder. Page builder are easy to create theme using drag and drop feature. WordPress offers page builder plugins but you can also buy or subscribe one. Example of the most used paid page builder is Divi. Divi is more than just a WordPress theme, it’s a completely new website building platform that replaces the standard WordPress post editor with a vastly superior visual editor. It can be enjoyed by design professionals and newcomers alike, giving you the power to create spectacular designs with surprising ease and efficiency.
Theme Installation via Theme Directory
1. Login to your site WP admin area: yoursitename.com/wp-admin/
2. Select Appearance panel then Themes.
3. Click ‘Add New‘ button.
4. You can either install or upload theme. If you wish to install theme from the theme directory, you can either use Search or Filter options to find the perfect theme you need. Click Preview link to preview the theme or Install link to install it.
Theme Installation via Upload
1. Login to your site WP admin area: yoursitename.com/wp-admin/
2. Select Appearance panel then Themes.
3. Click ‘Add New‘ button.
4. You can either install or upload theme. if you wish to upload theme make sure that your zip theme is ready for upload. Attach the zip file and click on Install Now.
Theme Activation
1. Login to your site WP admin area: yoursitename.com/wp-admin/
2. Select Appearance panel then Themes.
3. From the list of themes uploaded and downloaded, go over the theme thumbnail image for the theme you are interested in to see options for that theme. You can view more information about any theme by clicking Theme Details or click Preview to preview the theme. To activate the theme click the Activate button.
While themes are available in almost all kinds of website category, choosing the best theme might be a little difficult. So we will provide a few theme recommendations as to why choose a theme that has the font size, menus, search box, responsive design (that looks good on mobile, tablet, and desktop displays) that you want, while also working well with a page builder like Elementor.
While picking a theme, you should keep in mind the responsiveness it offers. Responsive themes follow the responsive web design approach that aims to offer optimal user experience across various devices and screen resolutions including desktop computers, tablets such as iPad, smartphones and other mobile devices. A responsive WordPress theme smoothly adjusts its layout based on the screen size and resolution.
Not only the responsiveness but also a theme that works perfectly with page builders like Elementor, rather than themes that have lots of options and settings. Why? This is to provide easy modification and a flexible design in the near future incase you want changes in your website. This also offers more flexibility to add and arrange sections of content on your page.
So when choosing you theme make sure that you know what you want and what possible changes you will do in the near future. In that way you can predict the possible problem and provide early solutions.