Now that you have your wordpress site set up and plugins installed your ready to start working on its appearance!

To take a look at your wordpress site you can simply go to the domain OR click “visit site” at the top left of the screen. This will allow you to see changes AS you make them which will be critically important.
This is probably how your site looks now …

To change your themes you have a couple of options. You can use the INTERNAL themes from WordPress OR you can find EXTERNAL themes and upload them. Both are quite easy to do so its just a matter of finding something you like!

The INTERNAL Method -

To change your wordpress theme … or the template appearance is actually quite easy. Back on your wordpress dashboard you can see an icon for “Appearance” above “Plugins” click here.

You can see your Current Theme is the WordPress Default theme. If you scroll down you can also see one other wordpress theme. Neither are particularly good looking so we may want to change the theme. To do so simple click “Add New themes” on the left. From here, similar to adding plugins, you can do a search for something specific you’re looking for OR click one of the options at the top “search, upload, featured, newest, recently updated”.

It helps, when picking a template, to understand what it is you want your site to do. For example a few basic questions you ask would be:

Do you want a custom header graphic?
How many columns do you want/need?
Do you want a clean “easy” visitor friendly site (i.e. white background with black text)?
What colors, if any, are important to you?

In my experience the “search” feature doesn’t work very well if you’re looking for something specific … meaning you have more than 1 variable you’re interested in. It works well though for at least focusing on something specific you’re looking for.

I am interested in a custom header theme and am ideally looking for 3 columns for my content, optin, and navigation … so I will do a search for the custom header and see what I find.

Next I see a list of results that I can pick from to update my theme! On page 4 I see a theme that meets my requirements called “Techozoic Fluid”. To install the theme I can simply click “Install” …

The EXTERNAL Method –

In this example you will probably do a search in Google for WordPress Themes. This will return a TON of results so anything you might want to add to “refine” your search will make your job a little easier.
As I look through the results I will visit www.wpthemes360.com simply to show you this process.
As I look through the example lets assume I like the Leia Theme and can preview it by clicking on the image. I will then click “Download Theme” to save it to my computer. This is the important part … you need to know WHERE you saved the file!

It should be in .ZIP format and save it!

To add it to your list of options back in your wordpress dashboard under Appearance and Add New Themes you will click UPLOAD.

From here you can click Browse to find the theme you saved and then Install NOW!

That’s it! You have now changed your wordpress theme!

Now you have wordpress set up its time to log in and configure your site! There are a few critical elements you will want to add as SOON as you log in BEFORE adding content.

You can see at the top of the page a reminder to change your password from something generic to a custom password. This is a GREAT idea to keep your site secure!

WordPress will automatically have inserted a post, page, category, and comment. You can either edit these or delete them when you’re ready to add content. I recommend deleting them which I will show you in a few minutes.

BEFORE you add content lets 1st talk a little more about wordpress. It is an extremely robust blogging tool. With a little experience and “know how” you can take full advantage of everything it has to offer.

The BIGGEST benefit to WordPress from a commercial standpoint is you get ALL the benefits of a BLOG AND you can make it look like a website! This means you can dramatically accelerate the opportunity to get indexed by the search engines and get traffic faster!

In order to pull this off there are a few critical “Plugins” you will want to add to your wordpress site. Plugins are generally free “modules” you can add to your wordpress site to make it more powerful and dymanic. You can see on the left a tab for Plugins.

I recommend adding the following for just the “bare bones” … there are MANY more to choose from so you will have to see what works for you and/or what you require your wordpress site to do.

WordPress gives you 2 plugins by default “Akismet” and “Hello Dolly” … you can see a description of each. Akismet is worth keeping but I recommend simply deleting the “Hello Dolly” plugin.

Under the Plugins tab that you have clicked you can see an “Add New” link … click there.

From here to can search for specific plugins you want to add. Most of the plugins I recommend are actually on the “popular” list so click on “popular” at the top of the page.

———–
You will want to add the following:
All in One SEO Pack
Google XML Sitemaps
Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button
Ultimate Google Analytics
———–

Now … depending on what other requirements you need for your wordpress site you may also want to add the following:

Contact Form 7 – to collect email addresses (contact forms)
WP e-Commerce – this allows to you add a “shopping cart” type feature if you want to directly sell something from your wordpress site
Viper’s Video Quicktags – This will allow to you to easily add already hosted video to your site.

———–

The list of additional plugins you can use are basically endless. I have made a few personal recommendations and will, of course, let you know of any others that I find helpful as they come up.

To add any plugin to your wordpress site simply click the “install” next to the plug in.
This takes you to a page where you can see a bit more information. Simply click INSTALL NOW.
Once your plugin is installed you will need to ACTIVATE it in order for it to take effect!

You can see the All in One SEO pack has now been installed and activated.
I will continue adding the additional wordpress plugins I recommended.

Finally we need to log into the ADMIN page to enable the All in One SEO pack!

Ladies and Gentlemen welcome to Essential WordPress Skills. This site will be dedicated to teaching how to get the most leverage for your wordpress site. Most sites try to have you follow instructions by reading step by step guidelines. As helpful as they are the BEST way to learn is to actually WATCH someone doing it.
In this 1st segement I will SHOWING you how to install wordpress on your site. There are 2 requirements you need BEFORE installing wordpress.

1). A hosting company
2). A domain

The hosting company you pick can play a MASSIVE role in how easy and/or hard installing wordpress can be. I personally recommend and use a host company called hostmonster. There are a number of reasons I use them but the biggest are:

1 – click install of wordpress
Unlimited hosting space (perfect for video sites!!)
Unlimited bandwidth (meaning I don’t have to worry about sending too much traffic to my site!!) AND
Incredible support for any and all questions I may have.

The best part is the hosting services only cost $5.95 to $6.95 per month!! That’s an incredible deal!

———-

The domain you pick is also important. It can play a factor in how effective you are able to drive traffic to your site in terms of SEO or Search Engine Optimization. There are a TON of resources on how to do keyword research and search engine optimization and I will talk about those a little later but for right now I want to focus on wordpress itself. I will assume, at this point, you already have a good idea what your site will be about and probably already have a domain.

The best recommendation I can make would be to sign up with hostmonster and transfer your domain. When you see how easy it is to install wordpress you will see why it’s the best decision you can make.

————

I will be demonstrating how to install wordpress onto a domain via hostmonster. As you can see this is your hostmonster homepage so the 1st thing you need to do is log into your cPanel or Control Panel. You can do this at the top right of the page and then click “Control Panel Login”.

You should now be logged into the cPanel … if you scroll down the middle of the page you will see a section called software/services. In this section you will see an icon that says “simple scripts”. Click this icon to see all the services you can install in the click of a button.

There are a LOT of extremely powerful options you have to install onto your website. Some of these services, including wordpress, can be a real pain to install and configure manually. Learning how to install wordpress should NOT be a difficult task.

Simply click on “Wordpress” under blogs. This takes you to a page that describes the features of wordpress and offers you the most current version for install. Click on the “Install” icon.

Step 1 – At this point you can pick which “site” you would like to install wordpress onto (assuming you have multiple sites). You can see in this example I will be installing wordpress onto www.EssentialWordpressSkills.com.

Step 2 – You can now configure some advanced options for your wordpress install. You really do not need to change anything here as most advanced options can be done later and to be perfectly honest most advanced options you will never use.

Step 3 – Accept the terms and conditions and then click “Complete”!

That’s it! No complicated FTP, unzipping, configuring, database creation, SQL rewriting, HTML editing, this list can go on! In a few simple clicks of a mouse you have the most recent secure version of wordpress installed onto your website!