In order to upgrade from the default WebPress theme, I decided to check out some free ones that I could change on my own using HTML. I Google’d these and found a few layouts that I liked. I picked this one because it was simple, and had a lot of space for information above the fold. I just need to change the colors (from black and tan) to yellow, white, and gold, the image (from someone’s living room???), the headings, and all this other text that appeared.

I uploaded a few others as backups, as not all theme folders that you upload will contain everything you need. Here’s how I uploaded them:

1. Logged into my HostGator cPanel.

2. Located the heading “Files” and clicked the “File Manager” icon.

3. Was prompted to chose from “File Manager Directory Selection”, selected “Document Root for: [ joannakinsman.com]“, and hit “Go”.

4. This brought me into the File Manager, where I referred to the list of folders on the left side of the blog as follows:

    - public_html
    – wp_content
    – themes

5. Found the “Upload” icon at the top of the page, and used the “Browse” option to find the theme folders I had dowloaded to my desktop. You can upload many folders at a time, and when finished, I returned to File Manager.

6. Selecting each uploaded folder individually (represented by a brown box), I clicked “Extract” to unzip the files, extracting the folder name that had been compressed, now represented by a blue folder, displaying the name the creator had given it. (You can rename them before uploading if it’s easier for you to rememeber them.)

7. Finally I was ready to log into to the back office of my blog, and selected the “Appearance”, then “Themes” tabs from the left panel. There were the themes I had uploaded – I clicked on the one I wanted and it appeared in a new box, and I selected “Activate” in top right corner.

I’ll have to play around with the HTML code on this to see what I can do with this to customize my page a bit so that’ll be next.