6 Themes and Plugins
I’m not sure whether changing the theme of your website will make it more attractive to search engines, but it will definitely have a positive effect on the human beings who visit. The theme controls the look and feel of your Internet identity, so you will probably want to spend some time selecting one.
Some themes have graphics at the top while others, like this one, use only words. A cool thing about graphics is that, if the theme you choose has a header photograph of, for example, a bridge in the fog, you can replace it with any picture in your collection, as long as you can fit it into the same dimensions.
There are themes with horizontal menu bars and vertical ones, or you can even choose not to have a menu bar at all There are narrow and wide themes, and ones with sidebars on the left, right, both or neither. And if you don’t like the colors, you can probably figure out how to change them.
Some themes use widgets and some do not. If you are not skilled at editing html I recommend you get a theme with widgets. This will make it easier when you are ready to add monitization in the form of AdSense ads, banner graphics, etc. It also makes it simpler for you to change what shows up where on your page, such as a calendar, search box, archive list, tag clouds, link lists, etc. I suggest you spend some time checking out all of the various themes available at the WordPress Theme Directory.
There’s also another way to find WordPress themes. If you do a lot of web surfing anyway, you might want to try this method…
Sneaky way to find a WordPress theme
When you visit a website that appeals to you, and you think it may have been built on the WordPress platform, here is how to discover which theme it is using. (The more familiar you get with WordPress, the easier it gets to recognize them.)
In your browser toolbar, select “View” and then “Source” with Internet Explorer or “Page Source” if your browser is Firefox. Do it now on this page and you’ll see what may appear to be incompresensible html coding, but somewhere near the top is a string, which reveals the WordPress theme I’m using…
Right after “wp-content/themes/” it says “blue-zinfandel,” and that is the theme this website uses. If you decide you’d like to try Blue Zinfandel for your site, all you have to do is go to http://themeviewer.com/downloads/. They may not have every WordPress theme in the world there, but they’ve got tons of them. If they don’t have the one you want, just go to Google.com and search for, for example, “wordpress plugin blue-zinfandel.” The beauty of WordPress and all the themes and plugins made for it, is they’re all free.
Some of my favorite themes with graphics are wp-andreas-01-12 and greenflower. For themes with no pictures, besides Blue Zinfandel I also like techdesigns.co.ukv1.0
Before you install your theme, you should also download some plugins. Then you can upload them to your site all at the same time.
Download these WordPress plugins
All in One SEO makes it easy to optimize your site. When you set it up, you enter your list of keywords, etc. Then, it automatically displays them for the search engines. It has no effect on the physical appearance of your site, only to the “behind the scenes” meta tags that spider-bots read.
If you only install one plugin, Google Sitemap Generator is the one that has the most profound effect on getting your site ranked well and quickly. It requires almost no set-up at all, and, whenever you write a new post, it re-writes your sitemap and automaticallyl tells Google, MSN and Ask.com about it.
Smart Update Pinger is good because it prevents you from accidentally getting the search engines mad at you. Every time you publish a post, WordPress automatically sends a “ping” to notify those websites on your ping list (I’ll give you a good list in another chapter). But the trouble is, if you edit one of those posts after publishing, WordPress will ping them again, and again with each re-edit. If this happens too often, it is going to look like you are spamming, and search engines will start treating you like the proverbial boy who cried wolf. They’ll ignore you. Smart Update Pinger prevents this from happening. It only sends out one ping per post, no matter how many times you edit it.
Subscribe me only helps optimize your site indirectly. It lets you put a collection of buttons onto, for example, your sidebar, so that a visitor can easily add your RSS feeds to whatever source they use, such as My Yahoo, or My AOL. You don’t even have to know what an RSS feed is. It’s very simple, and I’ll show you how to set it up in the next chapter.
Unzip
WordPress themes and plugins usually come compressed in the ZIP format. So you’ll need to be able to unzip them. If you’re using Windows, it’s easy. Just right click on the zipped file (once you’ve downloaded it) and select “Extract Files.”
FTP
Once your theme and plugins are downloaded and unzipped, you’ll need to upload them to your host using some kind of FTP software. The one I use is WS_FTP from Ipswitch, but I don’t think a free version is available anymore. Another free program I’ve tried and know is easy to use is FileZilla. Here is a link to download FileZilla 2008.
The folder into which you need to FTP your theme is “public_html/yourdomain/wp-content/themes/.” You’ll know you’ve navigated to the right folder if you see two other folders already there named “classic” and “default.”
Plugins go into “public_html/yourdomain/wp-content/plugins/.” There should already be one file there named hello.php.
After you’ve FTPd all your plugins and theme into place, then it’s time to visit your website and start configuring. Tell your browser to visit “http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin” and then sign in using the username and password you entered when you used Fantastico to install WordPress.