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WordPress Admin Basics: Appearance

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Wordpress

WordPress is ideal for small business websites

The Appearance section has 4 areas: themes, widgets, menus and editor. Unless you’re going to be editing your theme code yourself you can ignore the Editor section, if you change files in here your theme might stop working, there are better ways to change the CSS so I’d keep out of here if you can help it!

So, let’s take a look at the other areas to see how you can improve your site:

Themes

The Theme area is one of the most well-known. Here you can see all the themes you have installed and you can easily change the themes by activating a new one. The latest versions of WordPress also now have the ‘Live Preview’ feature, so you can try a new theme without actually activating it. A good idea if you want to see your content without putting it live.

You can also use the ‘Install Themes’ function to add new themes to your site. You can search through all the ones freely available on WordPress.org and easily install these with a couple of clicks (make sure they are tested with your theme version first!). Alternatively, if you have purchased a premium theme, this is where you can quickly upload the zip file and install it (you can also upload it manually via FTP).

Widgets

Widgets are one of the great fun areas of WordPress. The amount of widgetised areas entirely depends on your theme but typically these are in the Sidebar or Footer. WordPress automatically comes with a range of widgets you can drag and drop into these areas (and they are immediately displayed on site) e.g. pages, recent comments, links and text (where you can add any content you like). You may also find that your theme also has inbuilt widgetised areas, this theme for example has an inbuilt Twitter stream widget and a searchbox. Finally, you can add more widgets via plugins such as the WordPress Popular Posts widget you can see on the right ->

Many widgets come with settings you can tailor to your site – don’t forget to Save anything you’ve altered!

Menus

Finally, there is the Menu area. WordPress by default adds pages to your menu in the order you created them and you can change the page order in the Pages section. This Menu area allows you to build menus with sub-menus however you wish and you can also add your own custom links, categories, individual post and any custom post types to the menus as well. Basically, if your theme allows it, you have free reign over what you want to display and how. For a quick tutorial on adding custom menus to your site, have a look at this article I wrote last year: creating custom menus in WordPress.

So, that’s a brief introduction to the Appearance area, check out the links for some more details. If there is anything I’ve missed please let me know below:there are better ways to change the CSS

The post WordPress Admin Basics: Appearance appeared first on Small Business HQ.


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