Hello, this is Rob here from real carbonite.com. Now we're going to talk about the appearance section of the WordPress back end. So, if you go into the left of your WordPress administration area, and hover over appearance, you'll notice the first sub item is themes. So we'll click on that. The easiest way to describe a WordPress theme is to say it's like a skin. It's like changing the look of your website.
Although themes also can change the functionality of the website, but for the time being, let's just think of them as a skin. So as you can see here in appearance themes in our WordPress back end, we have the theme 2016. activated WordPress supply a free theme every year and it's named after To the year, they've been doing that since 2010. So as you can see, there's two other options we have here. And I'm going to activate 2015. Now that's activated 2015 is now on the top row on the left now, and 2016 has gone all the way over there. If we now go back to the homepage or any page of the site and refresh, you'll now see that the site looks completely different.
In fact, the sidebar is on the left hand side rather than the right hand side. I'll just change that back and activate 2016. Now themes are extremely important. There are a lot of them, you may have your favorites already. If you go to wordpress.org. You have a repository of themes here.
And you can search by the niche of your website or there are features Like colors, layout and other features that you can apply as filters within a search. However, I don't recommend you do it this way. That's because there are 10s of thousands of three themes out there. Not all of them are great. Some of them may look good, but may produce some HTML. That's not fantastic.
Maybe it will work against you in the search engines. They don't include premium themes that you pay for. And I would always tend to use a premium theme with my commercial WordPress work. There is a section called commercial themes here. However, I would advise you to look around at the commercial themes that are available and see what people are saying about certain themes and use that to inform your decision. So the theme is Extremely important, but at the moment we're sticking with 2016.
If you click customize the second subheading under appearance in the WordPress back end, you'll see some more ways to edit the appearance of your website. And you can do it in a very easy, user friendly way. I must also say that all of these various areas of the website Firstly, there'll be different depending on the theme that you have some themes allow this functionality to change these things this way, some don't. But you can also always change any of these elements in other ways at the WordPress back end that I'll be telling you about. So let's go into site identity first. And as you can see, we can change the site title, so let's call it Sam Alvarez viewers, and we actually can see what it looks like before.
We've seen Save that change. So you get a real time idea of how you're changing the site. That's the tagline, obviously. And if you instead of wanting the site title and the tagline as text up here, and you want a logo up here, you can do that here. And if you do that, that's not the only way these words appear on a web page. Let's just go back to the site.
And if we have a look up here at window in Chrome, you'll see that that site title is actually there in the HTML, this is actually a very good place to change the site icon site icon is this fav icon here at the top of the web browser. And you can change that here and it's a very good idea for you to do so. So let's save and publish that change we made to the site title. If we go back now to the customizing section. I'm going to leave all of these the fairly obvious one They do anyway, or maybe a couple of them aren't obvious, but I will come back to that. I'm going to click that cross there and make that disappear.
So that was themes customize. Now we're going to themes widgets. So the best way to explain widgets is that they are little bits of code, or functionality that you can drag and drop into various areas of your website. Here we've got a sidebar area content, bottom one and a content bottom two. So these are what's called digitized areas. And these are what's called widgets.
And you can reorder your widgets. Let's put Recent Posts at the bottom and let's delete the meta. There it goes. No need to save anything. Those changes are already in effect will now refresh. We're back on the other theme Remember, the recent posts have gone to the bottom, that widget, and the meta widget has now disappeared.
So we've now got search recent comments, archives categories, recent posts. And that's the order we have the widgets here. So very easy to see what the widgets do. And it's very easy to see how user friendly they are. Now you can get more widgets from other plugins. Other themes will have different widget eyes areas, you can have a homepage with widget eyes areas, and then you can drag and drop whatever functionality you want on the homepage.
So there's a great user friendly ways to change your website. So we'll be coming back to widgets later in the course, menus. We'll be coming back to this later in the course. But as you might imagine, this is a great way to create a menu just beneath the logo or the header area of your website, talking about The header, this theme, if you click through there will allow you to add a header to 1000 pixels by 280 pixels that's roughly the size of this top bit here. Similarly, background that does the same thing, you can click on that and it will open the Customize theme section. And you'll be able to load an image for the background.
The last section in appearance, I wouldn't advise you using appearance editor. This shows you the PHP code for all the files of the website. In fact, the one It starts with is the style CSS. So that's not PHP at CSS, which is a file you may want to edit if you are conversant in CSS. However, if you do want to edit this file, I wouldn't advise you to do it through the appearance editor in the world. Press administration section because these files are very long, and you would want to edit them using a proper code editor, which will make things much easier for you.
This is not a good way to edit code or text in any way. So I hope you enjoyed that little bit about how you can change the appearance using really user friendly areas of the WordPress back end. My name is Rob coven. I'll see you in the next video.