Need Extra Cash?

There are lots of free Wordpress themes so it is easy for an amateur blogger or just someone who has little to no knowledge of web languages to make their own website without having to fork out any cash. There are often frustrations with the free themes. For whatever reason, they may not look quite right with your content or you may just want to customize it a bit. The following article aims to give basic guidance to the above mentioned individual in making proper use of free Wordpress themes.

First off, all of the information we will reference is on Wordpress.org. There is a wealth of knowledge and a great community who can help with a lot of the issues you may have. Themes can be located and downloaded on from the extend tab. It is best to use ftp to load themes and plugins to your website. For those who don’t know how or don’t have the software, go to download.com and get ftp commander. It is simple to setup and use.

Expanding on your theme can be difficult (except for plugins which we will talk about) so I recommend getting free Wordpress themes which already have all of the functionality you want. Then you can cut the fat, take out stuff you don’t want. This can be difficult and you will have to have a basic understanding of html. Follow these steps and you should be OK.

• Decide what you want removed. For example, maybe you don’t want the date to show on a post.

• Go to Wordpress.org and look through the tag lists. For this example, we are looking for the tag, “the_date” which controls the date display for the post.

• Go to your Single Post file in the Wordpress theme editor (single.php). Do a search for the tag, “the_date” or whatever piece of code you are attempting to remove.

• The tag will be located within a php function which starts with “<?php” and ends with “?>”. For purposes of this example your tag will probably look more like this, “<?php (the_tags ()) : ?>.”

• Comment out the whole php function. We will use comments to remove it instead of removing the code so that the changes are easily reversed. Comments work like this. Anything between the comment tags does not produce on the front end. The comment tags are, “<!–” and “–>”. For the example, a commented out section will look like this, “<!–<?php (the_tags ()) : ?>–>”. This will cause the tags not to display on the single post page.

Another way to enhance your website is with plugins. There are some that everyone should have, like a sitemap, but others are your prerogative. Spend some time browsing the plugins and getting the ones which you like for your site. They all come with installation and usage instructions and can also be loaded to your website via ftp.

If you have any questions about how to use plugins or themes, you can usually get help from the creators website or from the Wordpress forums.