This read me will help you to understand the themes available here. If you wish to dig deeper into the styling, then head over to the CSS section.

Installing Themes

  1. After downloading the desired theme to your hard drive, unzip the file’s contents. A folder should be created automatically with the theme name containing the theme’s files.
  2. Upload the entire theme folder to your /wp-content/themes/ directory.
  3. Log in to your WordPress admin panel, click on Presentation, scroll down to the theme’s name (or screen shot), then click on the name or thumbnail image to activate it.

Using Widgets

A majority of the themes available here are WordPress widgets friendly, which means you can modify the sidebar from your admin panel. In order to use this function, you’ll need to have the WordPress widgets plugin installed.

Once the plugin is installed, make sure to activate the theme (see #3 from installing the theme). Once the theme has been activated, a new tab under the Presentation menu called Sidebar Widgets should appear. Click on that link in order to adjust the sidebar.

You can find more widgets at the WordPress widget blog.

Single Column Themes

The single column themes available will need to have a special page created in order to display the contents normally found in the sidebar.

When you’ve installed and activated the theme, create a new page (call it whatever you like) and from the Page Template drop down box, select Sidebar Page, then change the Post slug to sidebar. Save the page and update your permalink structure.

If you don’t plan to update the permalink structure or don’t want to have a sidebar page, then you should edit the header.php file in the theme and remove the link to the sidebar page. (Please see the comments within the header.php code.)