Basics of Choosing a Web Theme

What do you need to do to get your newly installed theme looking more interesting? Try looking for a new theme for your site. Look for one that is SEO optimized, Adsense optimized or both if making money from your site is one of your goals. Remember that the themes are just a base from where to begin. It is up to you to mold it so that it has the look that you want. When you choose a layout that is close to what you need or want then you will have less work ahead of you. Only small customizations may be required for you to get your theme looking just like you want it.

If you like a theme that is not Adsense optimized, you don’t really have to worry about that. You will be able to manually insert or use plug-ins to make this happen. Themes come in different categories: 2- 3- column, Adsense Optimized, K2 Themes, SEO optimized and more. SEO optimization is important to get traffic to your site by Yahoo, Google and the big search engines.

After you have selected your base theme you will need to upload it and activate. Then you will want to get some plug-ins. There are some standard plug-ins that you should always use.

Wassup is a plug-in that will provide you with all the stats you will ever want. You will be able to view reports and everything is customizable. Their summaries are provided in your Admin Panel.

Privacy Policy for Adsense is a plug-in that combats Google’s TOS changes that forces you to have a “Privacy Policy” page on your site if you have Google Adsense ads. This plug-in will automatically create the policy.

Social networking bookmark plug-in – there are many of these out there and they all do basically the same things. They will let you add a social network bookmark and sets of icons after your posts.

All In One SEO Pack is a great plug-in to have. You are able to set Meta tags for your title, description and keywords.

Akismet is one of the best spam protection filter plug-ins out there. This plug-in has to be activated with an API key to use the full version.

There are a lot of other useful widgets and plug-ins available. There are video widgets, live chat, image galleries, event calendars and more.

After you upload a plug-in to your server you have to activate it. In the Admin Panel you go to the plug-ins tab and you will see the list of your available plug-ins. You can activate the ones you choose and then you can configure the plug-ins in the settings tab or they may have a tab of their own.

This is the basic information you need to get started on customizing your theme, as well as trying to think of ways to optimize it with plug-ins and widgets. You don’t want to choose your theme on just looks alone. You may end up frustrated if you are not able to get it to do what you need. Take time in the beginning to research your options and try to make a good first choice.