The Best Way To Get Started With Our WordPress Themes

By mikedurkin in Blogs and Blogging, News

Introduction: This entire post was compiled from posts made by Iskwew, one of our repeat customers and a frequent contributor to our forum. She raises so many good points that we wanted to share this with the Solostream community through our website.

New To Solostream Themes? Here Are Some Tips For You

If you have just bought a theme, there are a few helpful things you need to know before you start setting up the theme, and discover that you can’t get it to look as nice as the demo you saw.

Make sure you upload the theme correctly to your server

When downloading the theme, it comes in a zipped file. Unzip the file with appropriate software. I use the inbuilt unzip functionality in Vista, but there are programs for unzip as well.

Look at the unzipped folder. Some of the themes will after unzipping have a two folders with the same name i.e. /wp-smooth_ basic/wp-smooth_basic/ Make sure you upload the theme from the lowest level folder. If you upload with two folders, one inside the other, the theme will not be functioning properly.

Read the posts on the theme demo site for your chosen theme.

You will find all the basic information you need to start setting it up. There are a few things common on the demo sites. A get started post, listing any additional plugins you need, and how to do the basic things you need to do to get it working, and information about Featured Posts, Banner Ads, etc.

Reading those posts will get the theme basics up and going (and with Solostream themes, it’s not hard!)

Search the forums

You can either search the whole forum (if you are at the top level) or any of the underlying theme forums (if you are in one of those). What you are struggling with will most likely have been encountered by other Solostream theme users.

Ask in the forums

If you have read the theme demo site, and searched the forums, but still haven’t found the answer, you can ask in the forums. The Soloteam and associates (Martin is a big help) are very helpful and can pretty much solve almost everything. Or maybe other forum users have had the same issues and know the answers. Be patient and you will get an answer, at least that’s my experience.

Avoid editing php and css files inside WordPress.

Download for instance PSpad editor, it’s freeware and makes working with theme files a lot easier. Download here: http://www.pspad.com/en/. Now all you need to do is to play around with colours in your theme settings page (for the themes that have those) or dive into your CSS.

Thanks Iskwew for the great contributions on this topic. It is greatly appreciated and helpful.

About the Author

Mike Durkin is CEO of Solostream. He is passionate about the power of publishing for everyone on the Internet. Prior to Solostream, he spent over 12 years working and consulting with various Internet and technology start-ups, with a focus on sales, marketing, and operations. Mike's Website.