Publishing E-Books For Dummies

Changing the Design of Your Website

Your brand-new site is fresh out of the box, and it’s using the default design. You might be perfectly happy with it — or you might want to customize it. (After all, a few thousand other blogs will also have the WordPress default look.) You may want to add a fresh new look, add new pages, arrange the menu differently, or change the elements that appear in the sidebar. All these tasks are simple and straightforward in WordPress, and I describe how to do them in the following sections.

Switching to a new WordPress theme

There’s no need to be a technical or design expert to have a great-looking blog: WordPress comes with lots of themes, or custom-made designs. You can switch to a new theme with only a few clicks. When you change themes, all your website content remains the same — everything you’ve written is still there, even if it’s in a different font or in a different place on the screen.

Follow these steps to change your WordPress theme:

1. Log in to your site so that you can see the dashboard.

2. Hover your cursor over the Appearance link in the panel on the left and then select Themes.

3. Scroll down to see the available themes.

You can see a few in Figure 9-3.

4. Choose a theme to try, and click the Activate link.

If you prefer, you can preview the theme using the Live Preview button. WordPress shows you how your site would look with the new theme, but it won’t make any actual changes to your site. In the Live Preview, ...