Blogging Elements

Blog Set-up Blueprint 2: Setting Up Your Blog

Posted on 06. Jun, 2009 by Ashwin in Blogging

We plan to hold your hand and take you through basic installation of a wordpress blog in this series of posts. In Part 1 of this series, we discussed how to install your blog on your domain through the cpanel for your hosting account. It is now time to actually do something to you blog so that it sees the light of the day.

Soon after installation, the classic wordpress theme shows up. an example of which is shown below.

You may want to use the same theme or download one of the million themes for wordpress off the Internet.

Procedure for downloading and using themes

No matter which theme you wuld like to download off the Internet, you will first need to have a FTP software like CuteFTP or FileZilla (this is the one I use).

You will need to have the  FTP access details like the host name (which is the domain name), username and password.

First choose the theme you like and download the file onto your computer. It would come in as a ZIP file. You will have  to extract it and then it would be ready for a direct upload to your server.

Log-in to your FTP softwar, find your public_html folder on the server side. Enter that and find the folder withyour blog’s name on it. You will then find a folder named “Wp-content”. After you click on that, you may find another folder called “themes”.

Open this folder, go to the left hand panel of your FTP software which shows you the files on your computer, find the extracted folder of your theme and upload it into that ‘themes’ folder.

After it is done, go back to “appearance” section of wordpress (2.5 version and above) and refresh. You should see your theme in there. See the snapshot below.

Once this is done, all you have to do is to sign-in to your blog’s back-end and start plugging content away, among other things. You would be able to access your blog’s backend directly by using a link such as http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin. The username and password would have been asked of you during installation of your blog.

Tags: Blog Installation, Blog Set-up, Blogging Basics, How to Download themes, How To Install Wordpress