Your homepage is the entry point for every new visitor and it’s imperative to have your homepage looking great and functioning exactly the way you want. Luckily, WordPress is a very versatile foundation that allows you to easily move and change things around without needing to know little (if anything) about coding.
Themes:
First, let’s talk about themes. If you’ve already got a WordPress website, then chances are that you’ve already seen a few different themes that came pre-installed. You can also download more themes easily simply by clicking here or just googling to find other themes.
Themes are a great starting point to getting your website looking the way you want and so choosing the right one is important. If you’ve got a business site then you likely don’t want your website to look like a magazine cover and vice-versa.
To easily change your theme simply go to your admin panel and click appearance – themes and add your new theme!
Managing your Widgets:
Your next step to changing the appearance of your homepage is to learn how to manage your widgets. Depending on your theme, you’ll have a variety of different things you can edit and move available to you.
Your first step is to go to appearance – widgets.
On the left side of the screen, you’ll find all the available widgets you can add to your homepage (the area on the right side of the screen). As you can see, there are a LOT of various widgets you can add, edit, and remove and so feel free to play around with them to see what fits your website best. Experimentation is never a bad thing, and learning how to better work your website will only help you in the long run.
Adding Plug-ins:
Plug-ins are another tool that will allow you to change your website’s homepage and may add various extra widgets (like author areas, social media tabs, etc). You can add plug-ins from various outside sources by going to Plugins – Add New. You can further refine this by searching for plug-ins that change your content layout.
Alternative Method:
If you’ve already added your plug-ins and widgets but they still don’t quite look right on your homepage, there’s a quick and easy solution! While still in the admin panel, click visit site in the top left corner. From there, click customize and you’ll be able to see all the widgets, taglines, headers, and other aspects of your homepage.
By clicking on the various tabs on the left, you can also change or add widgets, menus, images, colors, settings, and a whole host of other aspects.
If you instead need to change text in boxes on the homepage, you can do that by clicking on the little blue pencil icon.
WordPress truly is a fantastic tool for helping you create the website of your dreams without having to learn hundreds of hours worth of coding.