In Part 6 of How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas, you installed WordPress, and were rewarded with a site that is ready to go. It, unfortunately, is an ugly site, and no one wants an ugly site. So today’s lesson is a fun one. Let’s beautify the site and give it some personality – hopefully a bit of yours. You are going to find and use a pre-made theme. There are thousands of them available. The process is straightforward.

• Find a theme you like and download it.
• Upload it to your blog’s theme directory.
• Tell WordPress you wish to use that theme.
• Done. Enjoy your new beautiful web site.

I recently made note of what I believe are the best free GPL WordPress themes available. However, there are thousands of choices, so spend the day browsing through them over at themes.wordpress.net. This is a fun chore. I will often take a few hours out of my day just to browse the newest themes. So go find one you like, download it (all are free), and then come back here for detailed instructions on how to upload it and use it for your own blog.

Once you’ve downloaded your new theme, unzip it. If you don’t have a program that can unzip the files, go download and install any of the free zip file programs that PC World recommends.

Now, that it is unzipped, you need to upload the theme folder and all of its contents to your blog’s themes directory. Once again, you’ll go to your site’s control panel (www.yourdomain.com/cpanel) as directed in the email you received from your hosting company, log in, and choose File Manager.

You’ll then choose the public_html folder, by clicking on the little folder picture next to public_html.

Now, you’ll click on the folder next to wp-content, and the folder next to themes, which will take you to the themes directory. This is where you’ll be uploading your new theme folder. Click on the Upload Files link.

Browse your computer for the theme folder you just downloaded and unzipped. Click on Upload and wait until the entire folder and all of its contents have been uploaded to your blog’s theme directory.

Now log into your WordPress admin, by going to www.yourdomain.com/blog/wp-admin. Click on Presentation. Look for the theme you just uploaded in the list of Available Themes, click on it, and you are done. Go to www.yourdomain.com to see your brand new, beautiful site.

Let’s do one final thing to our new WordPress blog before we begin writing content. Log in to your admin (www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin), and click on Options. Now click on Permalinks. Select name and date based, and click on the Update Permalink Structure button. Scroll down, and you’ll see a bunch of gobbledygook code listed. Grab all of that code by highlighting it and pressing Ctrl-C. Now open up Notepad on your computer and press Ctrl-V to paste that code into Notepad. Choose File / Save from Notepad’s menu, and type in “.htaccess” in the filename portion and save to your Desktop. DO NOT have .txt at the end. DO have the quotation marks in there. You want to type the quotes. “.htaccess”. Now upload this .htaccess file to the public_html directory in your Cpanel File Manager. Do so by logging into your cpanel (www.yourdomain.com/cpanel), choosing File Manager, clicking on the folder next to public_html, clicking the Upload Files link, browsing to the .htaccess file you just created on your desktop, and clicking the Upload button.

Whew! All done. Although there are a lot of things you can do with your WordPress blog to tweak it a little more, you don’t need to deal with any of that for now (or ever for that matter). If you want to learn more about WordPress, and everything you can do with your new blog, visit the official WordPress site. Otherwise, sit back, smile and get ready to begin your new career.

The entire series of How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas:

• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part One (The Introduction)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Two (The WHAT)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Three (The DISCLAIMER)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Four (The Domain Name)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Five (The Hosting Plan)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Six (Installing WordPress)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Seven (Your WordPress Theme)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Eight (Your Blogging Voice)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Nine (Making Money)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Ten (The Summary)