Welcome to lesson 4 of the blogging tutorial!
One of the best things about WordPress is that you can change or customize your entire layout and interface design with just a few clicks. In WordPress, blog layouts are known as “Themes”.
What is a blog theme? Themes control the entire design of your WordPress blog.
To apply or change your blog interface , you need to install the themes template and it is this theme that will now represent your blog interface .
When you install new theme to your blog , it will comes with some default images , text and navigation’s menu in which you will just edit into your desirable needs.
To change your blog theme, there are two methods :
- Installing from third parties theme directory
- installing by uploading the theme file directory into your blog
In this tutorial I will demonstrate with method 1 which is installing from third party theme directory and the third party theme I will use for this tutorial is Astra as they offer good free theme and very easy for a beginner to use.
Now, let’s keep the story short and show you how to change your blog appearance with method 1 which is installing from third parties theme directory :
Login into your WordPress dashboard and in the upper left, click on the plugin and you will be redirected to a page below:
N.B: The plugin you accessed will enable you to install ASTRA component to enable you to install ASTRA themes (Remember, ASTRA is the third party theme we are using for this tutorial). Plugin in WordPress, helps to install extra functionality to enhance the WordPress capability.
After you clicked plugin , click add new plugin as shown below :
Enter ‘Astra’ into the search box in the top right corner to search for Astra starter templates
Now, once you see the Starter templates , just click ‘install now‘ as demonstrated below:
After you install it , you will also click ‘activate‘ to activate it
Once you activated it , your Astra theme now ready to be installed on your blog .
Now go back to your WordPress dashboard and in the upper left, hover on the “Appearance” tab and then click ‘Starter templates‘ .
And now, you are in Astra themes directory where you can choose any theme you want from thousands of available themes.
N.B: In this tutorial , we will assume that our blog will be on cooking and that means, the niche to use is all about cooking tips and, the theme we will be using will be familiar with cooking.
Now , enter ‘Recipe blog’ in the search box and choose Block Editor in the upper right corner. You will see many good cooking and recipes theme available for installation. In this tutorial, we chose the encircled theme below called “Recipe blog“. Click it to start the installation process
Click ‘Skip and continue‘
Scroll down and still click “Continue“
Leave the names ,email and other form details and tick all the advanced Options and click “Start and build my website” as I demonstrated below:
And finally you will see a congratulation message that your website is ready.
You have successfully changed your blog appearance .
If you have problem in your blog setup as i described, just contact me here and I will help you out
In the appearance theme compartment, you will see several free WordPress themes are already installed on your blog. That is, WordPress comes with a ton of free themes to choose from,
For this tutorial, I will demonstrate one of the three best free WordPress themes you can use:
Now, click Add new
>> then click popular
The three best free WordPress theme I will recommend are Kadence WP, Elementor for WordPress and Astra (all of which are 100% free, fast and have the ability to upgrade later for more extra features).
These three best free WordPress themes are well-designed, clean-looking themes that can work for just about any type of blog. In fact, many of the world’s top bloggers use one of these themes.
For instance, let’s say you choose Kadence WP as your theme. To install and activate it, just hover over the theme and click the “Activate” button. That’s it! You have changed the entire design of your blog with just one click!
Once you have installed your theme as I demonstrated above, you can as well customize to further sooth your taste by clicking on the Customize link beside the activated button.
One beautiful thing about installing theme on your blog is that, it will save you a lot of time in the blog designing. This is because most of what you want to add has almost added to it; yours is to make changes to it to suit your needs.
There will be built-in widgets and customization options that lets you tweak your blog design in the customization area of the blog.
You can watch the video below to see how I used Astra as the blog theme and how I customize the interface of the blog :
VIDEO HERE
Congratulation as you just changed your blog interface to more fascinating look!
You can recheck your beautiful blog by type in directly your domain name on the browser to view it. You are happy right!
Now, that you have a nice-looking blog, it remains on how to add contents to your blog so that your blog’s viewer can come to read it over. I will teach you about that in the next chapter.
Good, you just finish step 4
Wait ! I need to test your knowledge to be sure you are truly good to go to next step.
Test your knowledge with the short quiz to know if you truly understand STEP 4 and ready to proceed to STEP 5
If you wish, you can proceed to lesson 5 of the blogging tutorial . Click here to access lesson Five
N.B : incase you have any question bothering on this blogging tutorial ; Just contact me here