Read this only if you have a WordPress blog. If you don’t have WordPress, then have a great weekend! See ya!
However…
If you do run WordPress, they added a feature a short while back that makes upgrading it very, very easy.
One of the great things about WordPress is that it makes owning and running a website so very easy. You don’t have to know a thing about HTML to make your website look very professional — and to keep it that way — because in the WordPress system, the look of the website is kept totally separate from the content of the website.
They’ve got these things called “Themes” which are easy to install and use.
Well, sort of.
Because it used to be that you had to use FTP if you wanted to change the themes for your blog, and there are lots of people in internet marketing — beginners, mostly — who don’t want to have to know ANY techie stuff at all.
If you’ve got an older version of WordPress, your “Appearance” menu looks like this:
Notice there’s nothing there about uploading or installing new themes. You needed to FTP the new themes to your themes folder in order to see them on the Themes menu.
But with new version 2.92 of WordPress, they fixed that problem. It’s super simple, because now you can upgrade your theme with a few button clicks.
So here’s what you should do to make sure you’ve got this new feature, and to use it. They’ve made upgrading super-easy, too.
If your WordPress installation is somewhat recent, you can upgrade it with just a few button clicks. Log into your WordPress Dashboard (your WP-Admin page). If you see some text at the top that says that “WordPress 2.9.2 is Available. Please Upgrade Now”, just click the button.
In relatively new versions of WordPress, all you need to do is click that button and follow the prompts and your installation of WordPress will be updated automatically.
REAL COOL.
Now, when you go to your Appearance menu, you’ll see this:
See “Add New Themes”??? Click that, and you’re on your way to installing some new themes. Here’s what’s at the top of the next page:
As usual, you can just click and install any new themes you’ve already got loaded, but if you don’t have the theme you want loaded already, that’s when you’d have to go find the theme, download it to your hard drive, then mess with FTP to upload it.
But now, you’ve got two basic choices.
The first choice is to find a free theme by clicking Featured, Newest, Recently Updated or by searching for a theme. On that same page you’ll see lots of things you can search for (2 columns, 3 columns, preferred colors and other options).
Go try it out.
Now, if you’ve downloaded a theme, as you would if your purchased a premium theme, you’d have a “zipped” file on your hard drive. To install it, just click Upload, browse to the zipped theme file, and click Install.
You’re good to go.
And that is probably the best reason to upgrade your WordPress theme.
Of course, having the latest version of all your software is the best way to make sure your software has all its worst bugs fixed and is less susceptible to getting hacked (which is important in this overly-hacked online environment).
So, if only for that reason, go upgrade your WordPress blog now.
To Your Success,
–Mark
P.S. One thing about the theme you use…
Free themes can be a bit of a pain. They are often made by people who love their artwork more than they love running a blogging business, and if you want to customize the header, you need to mess with image editing software like PhotoShop or GIMP.
(Just yesterday, I helped a private consulting client set up his new Chiropractic blog…the theme was perfect except that he didn’t like the pill images. We’ve got to remove them now.)
Also, they are seldom built for running a blogging business.
In other words, they have often got no way to help you to actually make money from your blog. You’ve got to install plugins or modify the theme to accommodate your Adsense ads and your affiliate links, and to do other things that normal people want to do with their websites.
Plus, they often don’t play nice with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
So today, go play with the new WordPress theme uploader and installer. Tomorrow, I’ll tell you about a new WordPress theme that solves all of those problems.