How to install a new Wordpress theme and modify it?

The ease of changing the appearance of blogs is one of the main reasons why people use Wordpress as a blogging platform. Indeed you only have to Google “Wordpress themes” to obtain a list of free themes to cater for every taste under the sun. But exactly how do you install a new theme? These small steps will help you install your new theme and also aid you to make some modifications such as inserting a footer link.

1. Download your chosen theme to your computer
2. The theme will often come in a zip folder. Unzip it
3. Open your favorite FTP client and log-in to your website host.
4. Navigate to the location of your themes folder usually located at wp-content/themes/
5. Upload the new theme folder to this location
6. Close your FTP client
7. Next login to your Wordpress blog and navigate to themes under the Appearance tab
8. Select your new theme and activate it.

Adding a counter to your site

Often you will want to make some modifications to a theme. For instance you may want to add a counter to your blog. In a previous post I wrote on how you can insert Google analytics on your site. You will remember that the code was placed in the footer.php file. Changing the theme will mean that the code will no longer be active. You will have to repeat these steps for the new theme.

Adding a footer link to your theme

You might also want to add a link in your footer. In this case you go to the footer.php file as described above and then edit it. You only have to insert

<a href="http://www.your-domain.com">Your anchor text</a>

wherever you want to add the link. Most of the time theme already have a footer link. For instance the original code for a footer link in a particular theme will look like this:

Now you will want to insert your code and it should be like this:

I hope that this short tutorial will be helpful to get you started in your blogging career.