What is a WordPress Theme? It is the foundation of all great WordPress websites.
A WordPress theme provides the layout and style for a website. But it’s only a starting point. Once you choose a theme, you then get to make it your own.
That’s the beauty of using WordPress. The same theme can be used by many people but they rarely look the same!
What makes up a WordPress theme?
A WordPress theme is a collection of files. PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor – how they got PHP from that I’m not sure…) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) files.
The PHP files provide templates and functionality.
HTML provides the information and structure.
The CSS files provide the style.
If you’d like to know more, here’s a great article from Yoast with loads more detail.
One of the best parts of a WordPress theme is that you do not have to know any of the techie stuff in these files. That’s where customization comes in…
Making a WordPress Theme Your Own
The makers of WordPress themes do not expect you to use their theme “right out of the box”. Every theme I’ve ever looked at comes with a way to customize it.
What can you customize? Let’s take a look, you can…
- Set your Logo, Site Title and Site Icon. The site title appears on some themes below your logo. The Site Icon is the little image beside your website name in a browser. Like our little toad…
- Some themes let you set the fonts you want to use for headers and text.
- Choose background colours or images.
- Create different menus for different locations on your website. You can have one at the top and one in the bottom section (footer).
- Decide what appears in the header – phone number, email, social media icons.
- Add information to the sidebar using widgets. You can add Recent Posts, Recent Comments, and so much more.
- Set what the bottom of each page looks like. Contact information, links to your Privacy Policy, Copyright info. You can make it your own with widgets!
- In some themes you can set a default button style. A nice way to keep them consistent everywhere on your site.
- Choose your homepage. It can be your blog or a page you’ve created.
- If you need something completely unique, you can even add your own CSS code.
With so many options in even the most basic WordPress theme, it’s easy to make your website perfect for your business.
Pages and Posts, oh my
Each WordPress theme lets you add Pages. Pages are typically ones like Home, Contact, About. You’ve seen them on the menus of loads of websites.
Posts are blog posts. Like this one. Again, each WordPress theme lets you add posts so you can tell website visitors what’s going on in your business.
Next up? Content
Now that you have the style all set, it’s time to personalize the theme. Content is the words and pictures that fill your website.
Your theme probably came with default text (very often the Lorem Ipsum blurb) and stock images.
You can swap out all those default pieces to truly make the website your own.
Add things like what your business is all about, who you are and what products or services you offer.
Pictures can show customers about your business. A picture of your store or office. Pictures of you. How about pictures showing your services or products?
So, as you can see, a WordPress theme gives you the basic building blocks for a website. It’s a great starting place and helps you get a website up and running without too much trouble.
You make it your own by customizing and adding your information.
Oh, and did I mention that, if you get tired of your WordPress theme or find one you like better – you can change it! Very often with the click of 1 button.
With that 1 click, the whole look and feel of your website changes. Presto, magic.
Themes are one of the reasons I use WordPress for all my websites. Want to know more reasons? You can find them in this blog post.
