Introduction

When websites were a new thing, we all pretty much did nothing more than own a whole ton of domains with weird names in the hope that someday we would use these to our benefit. Well, Now standing far ahead in the future, we need to keep something in mind today anyone can find a thousand websites on the internet. Then, how may you attract the maximum audience to your website? By differentiating, not only in terms of the features and plugins but also through the appearance of your WordPress website.

What determines your website’s appearance?

Putting everything in perspective, it is substantial to know that whatever changes you want to make to your website’s appearance can only be made through modifying your WordPress theme(s)

To add a particular theme to your website, Go to your WordPress Dashboard, and toggle to the ‘Appearances’ option. Tapping on that option will open a dropdown menu where you shall find ‘Themes’

This should open a search menu on the right where you can discover a plethora of different types and variations of themes to integrate into your website to make it look more appealing to your target audience.

How can changes be made to your website’s appearance?

To make changes to your existing themes, the process is a bit different.

Select the ‘Appearances’ option from the right-side menu and toggle to ‘Customize’

Here, on the right side, you will observe a preview of the theme that you chose. On the left-hand side, you shall have a settings section where you can make changes, that will show up on the preview, and Voila! Whatever changes you need, you can make them fit into your website through this section

In the customize section, you will find 8 main types of changes you can make (though you can add more via plugins like 404 Error Page & Theme File Editor added above):

1. Themes: This section allows you to change your parent theme. Here you can select a theme provided by WordPress or Upload your own theme after downloading by a third party like ThemeForest or Divi Themes.
   
2. Customize: you can change basic information on your website (eg: tagline, title)
   
   1. Colors: change the background and website colors
   2. Static front page: you can choose what you want to show on your homepage, or show your latest posts
3. Menus: Your website would have various menus that must be placed in the right place. The menu helps users to navigate between pages.
   
4. Widgets: You can add widgets to your website, on the sidebars and footers. It helps you to display constant content across all pages. It can be also used to display Ads on your website.
   
5. Header: Here you can choose a header image for your website homepage
6. Background: This is the image that stays in the background
7. Install Plugins: Plugins do have their different section, but you can also navigate to the plugins page from here. Plugins provide you access to WordPress plugins developed by WordPress and other developers. Every plugin is designed in a way to help you solve certain issue that is not provided by WordPress as default functionality. We will discuss Plugins in details in a different article.