Setting Up the Theme: A Step-by-Step Guide

To start setting up the theme, we begin by visiting our website and observing its hero section. As we can see, there is a lot to explore and customize within this section. To do so, we need to navigate back to the WordPress dashboard and click on the "Appearance" option.

Upon clicking on the "Appearance" tab, we are presented with several options for customizing our theme. One of these options is the "Theme Options" menu, which provides us with a range of settings to tweak and refine our website's design. In this section, we can upload a customized logo to be displayed at the top left corner of our website. This feature allows us to add a personal touch to our website's branding.

Another option available within the "Theme Options" menu is the ability to create custom CSS stylesheets. For those who know how to write CSS code, this feature provides an opportunity to manipulate our website's design and layout. The theme editor also allows us to make these changes directly without needing to access FTP files or other coding tools.

Moving on to the "Homepage" section of the theme options, we can upload a banner image that will be displayed prominently at the top of our homepage. In this case, we've created an image with dimensions 1,200 pixels x 590, which is recommended by the theme. To upload this image, we simply drag and drop it into the designated area within the theme options.

The "Upload" feature also utilizes WordPress's drag-and-drop functionality, making it easy to integrate images into our website. Once the image is uploaded, we can customize its title and description as needed. In this case, we've chosen to call our banner image "Man on a Train." To complete the setup, we select the option to use this image at the bottom of the homepage.

If desired, we can also delete or replace any images within this section by clicking the minus sign at the bottom of the page. However, in this case, we're pleased with our banner image and choose to leave it as is.

To fine-tune the appearance of our image, we use WordPress's color picker tool to select a black background. This allows us to create a dramatic effect where the type overlays the image. We also consider using images that are less detailed in order to ensure they remain legible even when overlaid with text.

Finally, once all necessary settings have been saved, our homepage is complete and ready for viewing. In this case, we've used a blurrier image of "Man on a Train" as the background, allowing the type to be visible above it. By setting up our theme in this way, we're able to create a visually appealing and cohesive design that reflects our brand identity.

Upcoming Videos: Portfolio Development

In our next video, we'll delve into the process of creating a portfolio using this WordPress theme. We'll explore the various options available for organizing and showcasing our work, as well as provide tips and tricks for optimizing our portfolio for maximum visibility. Whether you're an artist, writer, or entrepreneur, having a strong online presence is essential for building your personal brand and connecting with potential clients.

For those interested in learning more about how to create a custom portfolio using this theme, be sure to tune in to our next video. We'll take you through the step-by-step process of setting up your portfolio, including organizing your work into sections and categories, adding images and descriptions, and optimizing for search engine optimization (SEO). By the end of this tutorial, you'll have a beautifully designed portfolio that showcases your skills and talents to the world.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody Ted Forbes here welcome back and in the last video I showed you how we could extremely rapidly set up a WordPress blog hosting domain WordPress the whole works and we just did it in under 5 minutes and I know that was a little bit of an extreme example but I did want to show you how quick and easy it is to get this done and we're going to talk a little bit about WordPress particularly uh with getting a theme that's going to work uh in this video here and so you know this is what we set up in the last video and this is my basic WordPress page and you know WordPress comes with some really nice looking themes but um you know part of the problem is they're the default theme and so you know the chances that somebody else's website would look a lot like this are very high and also WordPress is set up to be a Blog and one of the things that you know if you're a photographer which is the point of these videos is that you need WordPress to behave in a little bit different way so you can set up as a portfolio I'm going to show you how to do that and this is typically done with theming and if you go under I'm going to go back I'm logged in so up at the top I have my little logged in bar and I'm going to go to the dashboard here and this takes me to wordpress's back end I'm not going to go too deep into this stuff cuz you know some of you may be familiar with WordPress already and uh if you're not I just want to show you real quick on the left hand side you know under the categories of options that I've got here there's there's a um category for appearance and the first one is themes and the whole idea with WordPress and I think this is great is it separates your content from your design so you can literally change your theme or you can change completely the way it looks and your content stays the same and I'm going to give you an example here let me open a new window with the website in it and I'm going to change the theme so you can see how quickly this goes now not that we have a ton of content in here we just have one little blog post and then there's a sample page I'm going to go back to the back end here and manage themes WordPress comes with two themes there's one called 2011 and then the one that was designed the year before in 2010 and both have some different options and stuff and so under each you know and I can put more themes in here and each one of them you can do a live preview you can so you can check it out I'm just going to go ahead and say activate and uh it's going to activate this theme let's go back over to the page here and I'm just going to refresh this page and you will see that my design completely changes yet my content stays the same and I think that's pretty important um particularly later on down the line you get a couple years into your website sometimes less than that and you just kind of want to refresh you want a new design or something well it's really easy to do or later on down the line if you want to design your own work press themes you know again it's easy to do so anyway um but we're going to set this up for a portfolio so we need a theme that will specifically do that and there's a ton of free themes out there and believe me I've had a number of years experience with WordPress and it's run the gamut there are some good free themes um I haven't found any for portfolio use that really worked very well um but I did find a pretty reasonable paid theme um that if you you know back on the article where you're probably watching this video there's a company that I like called theme trust and uh if we open up the theme trust homepage here they have a collection of themes that they've designed that are specifically targeted uh towards portfolio websites be it a photographer a designer um an Architecture Firm whatever it is that you're doing and you want a theme uh if I go click on themes they have fully functioning demos of each theme that they've got and they're very reasonably priced I think uh considering the amount of time and it saves you trying to modify somebody else's theme which I actually think is the most timec consuming or whether you're designing your own and even in that in case you really need to know what you're doing um but right out of the box I think the uh theme uh theme trust themes are exceptionally good there's a brand new one called mindful that I haven't tried yet but my favorite and I've tried probably oh I've purchased probably six or seven of these from them actually I think I've purchased eight um but my favorite is hero and let me show you why I like Hero Let's go ahead and select live demo here and we're going to install this actually uh there's a couple things about theme trust first of all it's GPL license and so your glp license so you can reuse them as much as want you can use them for commercial websites and personal websites uh sometimes there's restrictions on those you buy a theme and you can't use it if you're going to try and sell something so I really like that about the theme trust themes is that's the license for all of them so if you buy one theme you can use it on any number of websites you might have um also another thing I really like about theme trust is these are what are known as responsive designs um and they're really cool and so basically what that means is that the layout in a responsive design changes depending on what device you're looking at the website on so for instance if you have a smartphone um iPhone Android whatever it is you have you know that when you go to websites you can view the website but sometimes the layout uh because it's being shrunk down to that tiny little screen the links are really small and sometimes they're hard to click on if there's a lot of them crammed together and so responsive design the idea behind it is that depending on the size of the window it changes that layout and I'll show you what that means if you go to the demo and I'm just going to resize the window here and you can see kind of here's the iPad range kind of changes it and then when you get all the way down to iPhone it completely changed it so now I can scroll through and everything stacked nothing went small it it literally changed the layout depending on the screen size uh it also ensures that no matter what people are using to look at your website even if it's just a small monitor computer that your your your layout won't break everything is always visible that you don't ever get the the horrid horizontal scrolling so that's one thing another thing I really like about uh theme trust work and most of their themes um they they label them in there not all of them but but a good 80% of them are responsive design uh it's a newer thing so anyway um that's basically the deal so how do you get started on this well if you purchase uh one of these themes and I own hero and that's the one I really like I'm going to show you this in this example let's close this I'm going to go back over to my website here let's go back into the admin area and basically when you purchase hero they will send you a link for download and make sure you put that zip file in a safe place so you don't lose it um I think they do allow you to redownload it and there ways to do it it's just it's easier if you can kind of keep it in handy and on my desktop there's the zip file and I could unzip this and FTP it up and all that but WordPress makes this really easy I'm going to go I'm under themes right now if I go to install themes I'm going to click on that going show you how to install hero and so basically I can go search and this will search the WordPress database for stuff that's listed on their site and some of them are paid most of them are free but under the top little bar here you'll see another one that said upload a little link I'm going to click on upload and it allows me to upload a file and what you're looking for is that zipped file so if I say choose file and we'll go to my desktop and I'm going to select hero. zip and I'm going to choose that let's say install now and it'll take just a second to upload that file and unpackage It theme is installed successfully I can activate it immediately let's go back I'm just going to go back to themes under appearance and we should see it listed there it is hero and usually they have a screenshot associated with it uh this one just has the name of the site I can do a live preview if I want when you click on live preview it basically will um will show you what your website's going to look like with this theme applied and it's kind of blank right now cuz there's some options we need to configure in here so let's cancel this I'm going to go ahead let's just activate it and um we'll activate the theme and what you're going to see now if I go VI visit my website is that you know it it it's loaded hero but there's a lot of options in here I need to fill out and I'll go ahead and show you the first one right now and up here where it says clean respon of a minimal portfolio WordPress theme this is all customizable and in the hero demo there was an image back behind it and so I'll show you how to do that so let's go back to the dashboard and if I go under appearance I have selection of themes but now I have some new Options under here there's theme options menus all that stuff what we're going to do is we're going to look at theme options and these are the options I have for hero um I can upload a customized logo that will put it up on the top left of the website fa if I have one of those I can even do custom um CSS stylesheets so if you know how to write CSS you can start to manipulate your website and it's great you can do it right here inside the theme editor you don't have to go FTP and start coding files and all it's just really handy to have uh if you go under homepage I believe it is here it is top one says Banner image and I've already created a banner image that I want to go back there and it tells you in here you want to upload an image for the homepage Banner the recommended dimensions are 1,200 pixels x 590 which I've done and if if I go ahead and say upload it's going to give me the the upload thing here this is a really cool thing in the new versions of Wordpress is they have drag and drop so this file is actually on my desktop here see it says train guy edit and I'm just going to drag and drop it up there and it will go ahead upload it crunch it and uh here's all my info and it made a little thumbnail and all that we don't need to know about that necessarily right now could change the title if I want we'll call this man on a train um that's certainly cool and then what we're going to do is come down here and I'm going to say use this image at the bottom that is our option so let's just go ahead and select that say use this image voila it has used the image now if you want to take this away or put a different image in here you can go down here and use this little um minus sign at the bottom to delete the image that's in there but I like this one it looks good the other thing I want to do is this image uh it's supposed to kind of Go full screen but depending on the size of the browser window it may have some edges that you see so what I want to do and I kind of edited this if you can see with this massive vignette in here um and so it goes to Black so what we're going to do is take this uh Color Picker here and uh we're just going to go ahead and select a black color here go ahead and go away and I can also change the text in here I'm going to leave it for now because I don't know what I want to put in there necessarily uh we just kind of want to see it but once you're done if you go all the way down to the bottom and there's a lot you can control on here as far as the homepage goes you want to save options if you leave the page it won't put that image in there because you need to save your options and once the options are saved now I can go back in let's say visit site and you can see that my banner is in there pretty cool and I love the way this kind of uh you know the way the style sheets work with this kind of Parallax effect uh so anyway there's my man on train um I kind of prefer if you're going to run type over the image that the image needs to you know noticed I used a pretty blurry image that's a little bit abstract um because the type will be unreadable if you put something that's too detailed back there so that's just something to think about um we're going to do another video here and I'll I'll move on um this is just basic setting up the theme it's that easy um you go to theme trust um purchase the theme they send you a link download the link you upload it to your website activate it you're done and uh you can start to customize the homepage you can even customize the type faces that are on here and some advanced stuff um I'm going to show you how to start putting a portfolio together but we're going to do it in the next video so um uh thanks for watching this and uh stay tuned and uh I'm going to go ahead and we'll move on to that nowhey everybody Ted Forbes here welcome back and in the last video I showed you how we could extremely rapidly set up a WordPress blog hosting domain WordPress the whole works and we just did it in under 5 minutes and I know that was a little bit of an extreme example but I did want to show you how quick and easy it is to get this done and we're going to talk a little bit about WordPress particularly uh with getting a theme that's going to work uh in this video here and so you know this is what we set up in the last video and this is my basic WordPress page and you know WordPress comes with some really nice looking themes but um you know part of the problem is they're the default theme and so you know the chances that somebody else's website would look a lot like this are very high and also WordPress is set up to be a Blog and one of the things that you know if you're a photographer which is the point of these videos is that you need WordPress to behave in a little bit different way so you can set up as a portfolio I'm going to show you how to do that and this is typically done with theming and if you go under I'm going to go back I'm logged in so up at the top I have my little logged in bar and I'm going to go to the dashboard here and this takes me to wordpress's back end I'm not going to go too deep into this stuff cuz you know some of you may be familiar with WordPress already and uh if you're not I just want to show you real quick on the left hand side you know under the categories of options that I've got here there's there's a um category for appearance and the first one is themes and the whole idea with WordPress and I think this is great is it separates your content from your design so you can literally change your theme or you can change completely the way it looks and your content stays the same and I'm going to give you an example here let me open a new window with the website in it and I'm going to change the theme so you can see how quickly this goes now not that we have a ton of content in here we just have one little blog post and then there's a sample page I'm going to go back to the back end here and manage themes WordPress comes with two themes there's one called 2011 and then the one that was designed the year before in 2010 and both have some different options and stuff and so under each you know and I can put more themes in here and each one of them you can do a live preview you can so you can check it out I'm just going to go ahead and say activate and uh it's going to activate this theme let's go back over to the page here and I'm just going to refresh this page and you will see that my design completely changes yet my content stays the same and I think that's pretty important um particularly later on down the line you get a couple years into your website sometimes less than that and you just kind of want to refresh you want a new design or something well it's really easy to do or later on down the line if you want to design your own work press themes you know again it's easy to do so anyway um but we're going to set this up for a portfolio so we need a theme that will specifically do that and there's a ton of free themes out there and believe me I've had a number of years experience with WordPress and it's run the gamut there are some good free themes um I haven't found any for portfolio use that really worked very well um but I did find a pretty reasonable paid theme um that if you you know back on the article where you're probably watching this video there's a company that I like called theme trust and uh if we open up the theme trust homepage here they have a collection of themes that they've designed that are specifically targeted uh towards portfolio websites be it a photographer a designer um an Architecture Firm whatever it is that you're doing and you want a theme uh if I go click on themes they have fully functioning demos of each theme that they've got and they're very reasonably priced I think uh considering the amount of time and it saves you trying to modify somebody else's theme which I actually think is the most timec consuming or whether you're designing your own and even in that in case you really need to know what you're doing um but right out of the box I think the uh theme uh theme trust themes are exceptionally good there's a brand new one called mindful that I haven't tried yet but my favorite and I've tried probably oh I've purchased probably six or seven of these from them actually I think I've purchased eight um but my favorite is hero and let me show you why I like Hero Let's go ahead and select live demo here and we're going to install this actually uh there's a couple things about theme trust first of all it's GPL license and so your glp license so you can reuse them as much as want you can use them for commercial websites and personal websites uh sometimes there's restrictions on those you buy a theme and you can't use it if you're going to try and sell something so I really like that about the theme trust themes is that's the license for all of them so if you buy one theme you can use it on any number of websites you might have um also another thing I really like about theme trust is these are what are known as responsive designs um and they're really cool and so basically what that means is that the layout in a responsive design changes depending on what device you're looking at the website on so for instance if you have a smartphone um iPhone Android whatever it is you have you know that when you go to websites you can view the website but sometimes the layout uh because it's being shrunk down to that tiny little screen the links are really small and sometimes they're hard to click on if there's a lot of them crammed together and so responsive design the idea behind it is that depending on the size of the window it changes that layout and I'll show you what that means if you go to the demo and I'm just going to resize the window here and you can see kind of here's the iPad range kind of changes it and then when you get all the way down to iPhone it completely changed it so now I can scroll through and everything stacked nothing went small it it literally changed the layout depending on the screen size uh it also ensures that no matter what people are using to look at your website even if it's just a small monitor computer that your your your layout won't break everything is always visible that you don't ever get the the horrid horizontal scrolling so that's one thing another thing I really like about uh theme trust work and most of their themes um they they label them in there not all of them but but a good 80% of them are responsive design uh it's a newer thing so anyway um that's basically the deal so how do you get started on this well if you purchase uh one of these themes and I own hero and that's the one I really like I'm going to show you this in this example let's close this I'm going to go back over to my website here let's go back into the admin area and basically when you purchase hero they will send you a link for download and make sure you put that zip file in a safe place so you don't lose it um I think they do allow you to redownload it and there ways to do it it's just it's easier if you can kind of keep it in handy and on my desktop there's the zip file and I could unzip this and FTP it up and all that but WordPress makes this really easy I'm going to go I'm under themes right now if I go to install themes I'm going to click on that going show you how to install hero and so basically I can go search and this will search the WordPress database for stuff that's listed on their site and some of them are paid most of them are free but under the top little bar here you'll see another one that said upload a little link I'm going to click on upload and it allows me to upload a file and what you're looking for is that zipped file so if I say choose file and we'll go to my desktop and I'm going to select hero. zip and I'm going to choose that let's say install now and it'll take just a second to upload that file and unpackage It theme is installed successfully I can activate it immediately let's go back I'm just going to go back to themes under appearance and we should see it listed there it is hero and usually they have a screenshot associated with it uh this one just has the name of the site I can do a live preview if I want when you click on live preview it basically will um will show you what your website's going to look like with this theme applied and it's kind of blank right now cuz there's some options we need to configure in here so let's cancel this I'm going to go ahead let's just activate it and um we'll activate the theme and what you're going to see now if I go VI visit my website is that you know it it it's loaded hero but there's a lot of options in here I need to fill out and I'll go ahead and show you the first one right now and up here where it says clean respon of a minimal portfolio WordPress theme this is all customizable and in the hero demo there was an image back behind it and so I'll show you how to do that so let's go back to the dashboard and if I go under appearance I have selection of themes but now I have some new Options under here there's theme options menus all that stuff what we're going to do is we're going to look at theme options and these are the options I have for hero um I can upload a customized logo that will put it up on the top left of the website fa if I have one of those I can even do custom um CSS stylesheets so if you know how to write CSS you can start to manipulate your website and it's great you can do it right here inside the theme editor you don't have to go FTP and start coding files and all it's just really handy to have uh if you go under homepage I believe it is here it is top one says Banner image and I've already created a banner image that I want to go back there and it tells you in here you want to upload an image for the homepage Banner the recommended dimensions are 1,200 pixels x 590 which I've done and if if I go ahead and say upload it's going to give me the the upload thing here this is a really cool thing in the new versions of Wordpress is they have drag and drop so this file is actually on my desktop here see it says train guy edit and I'm just going to drag and drop it up there and it will go ahead upload it crunch it and uh here's all my info and it made a little thumbnail and all that we don't need to know about that necessarily right now could change the title if I want we'll call this man on a train um that's certainly cool and then what we're going to do is come down here and I'm going to say use this image at the bottom that is our option so let's just go ahead and select that say use this image voila it has used the image now if you want to take this away or put a different image in here you can go down here and use this little um minus sign at the bottom to delete the image that's in there but I like this one it looks good the other thing I want to do is this image uh it's supposed to kind of Go full screen but depending on the size of the browser window it may have some edges that you see so what I want to do and I kind of edited this if you can see with this massive vignette in here um and so it goes to Black so what we're going to do is take this uh Color Picker here and uh we're just going to go ahead and select a black color here go ahead and go away and I can also change the text in here I'm going to leave it for now because I don't know what I want to put in there necessarily uh we just kind of want to see it but once you're done if you go all the way down to the bottom and there's a lot you can control on here as far as the homepage goes you want to save options if you leave the page it won't put that image in there because you need to save your options and once the options are saved now I can go back in let's say visit site and you can see that my banner is in there pretty cool and I love the way this kind of uh you know the way the style sheets work with this kind of Parallax effect uh so anyway there's my man on train um I kind of prefer if you're going to run type over the image that the image needs to you know noticed I used a pretty blurry image that's a little bit abstract um because the type will be unreadable if you put something that's too detailed back there so that's just something to think about um we're going to do another video here and I'll I'll move on um this is just basic setting up the theme it's that easy um you go to theme trust um purchase the theme they send you a link download the link you upload it to your website activate it you're done and uh you can start to customize the homepage you can even customize the type faces that are on here and some advanced stuff um I'm going to show you how to start putting a portfolio together but we're going to do it in the next video so um uh thanks for watching this and uh stay tuned and uh I'm going to go ahead and we'll move on to that now\n"