After your set up your account with your wordpress hosting provider, it is time to get a theme for your blog or website. Deciding what theme to get, depends primarily on your website subject. There many free and premium themes to select from. Free themes are very easy to find however, they may contain broken links, limited widget functionality and are usually not flexible to modify. Premium themes come with full support by the provider and are fully flexible to modify.

So, how do you install a theme? There are two ways to do it:

Manually – Installing a theme manually is much easier to do in comparison to installing wordpress engine itself. Download the theme you want to install at your computer and unzip all files. Do not modify any names. Login to your server with your ftp account and then go to wp content and then wp themes. There will be a list with all the available themes for your blog. Using an ftp client, upload the unzipped folder with the new theme at the wp themes folder. Once you complete uploading, log in to your wp admin area and go to appearance. You should be able to see all the available themes as well as the newly uploaded. Select the new theme and activate. Your new theme is installed. Now you can add plugins and setup your widgets.

Automatically – Login to your wp admin area and then go to appearance and then widgets. If you know the theme you are planning to download, simply search for it at the library. Once you locate it, click on installation and provide the ftp login information. Wait till the theme is installed and once installation is complete go to appearance and activate the theme. Automatic installations often fail due to broken links of the theme folder, slow internet connection or a server glitch.

I am in favour of the manual way, simply because it is easy, fast and hard to fail.