WordPress beginners with no design background are often intimidated by the appearance menu (mostly because of unfamiliar acronyms like AMP and CSS). While there are a lot of options, many of them are self-explanatory, and WordPress is very user-friendly even for beginners. Once you know what you’re looking at, you will find yourself less wary of exploration. Try not to be overwhelmed. Remember, you almost definitely aren’t going to mess up your whole site by changing these options, and you can almost always change things back. It can be confusing because every option is not available on all themes and plans, and sometimes things are located in slightly different places, depending on your theme. I encourage you to look around and get used to the options you have.
For the most part, you’ll find these options under Appearance in your WordPress Dashboard:
- Themes. This is where you will go to choose a theme for your site. This decision gives some people a tremendous amount of anxiety because the theme controls how your site looks and functions. If you’re really unsure about your abilities, you will want to choose a theme that is pretty close to how you would like your site to look and feel. However, you will be able to customize things more and more as you learn. You will be surprised by how different your site can look from the theme you have chosen; this site, for example, looks nothing like the demo for its theme. Also, you can change your theme at any time, so don’t get too hung up here. Just choose something that you like for now, and worry about customization later.
- Customize. This menu will likely have 10-12 options within it (depending on whether the theme you’ve chosen supports featured content, etc.).
A. Site identity. This is where you will add the title, tagline, logo and site icon (the site icon is the image that appears on the browser tab). Everything here is optional; however, adding a site title and tagline will improve your search rankings.
B. Colors and Backgrounds. This is where you will choose colors and backgrounds (which is pretty self-explanatory). This area is highly customizable, allowing you to create your own color palettes or generate one based on your logo or header image. Be sure to click the more buttons to explore options.
C. Fonts. Again, this is self-explanatory.
D. Header Image (not supported by all themes). This is where you can choose an image for the tops of your pages or upload your own (the ideal dimensions are shown in this menu).
E. Menus. This is where you build your menus, and this is where I start when I’m designing a site. Here is where you design the architecture of your site. You basically build what looks like an outline of what pages go where, and what leads to what. You will choose the locations of your menus (side bar, top, etc.). Click “add item” to add pages to each menu and “reorder” to simply drag things around.
F. Content Options (varies by theme). Here you will choose options for your blog, such as whether the date and author name is displayed, the post order, and how to handle images in posts.
G. Widgets. Go here to choose widgets displayed as footers on your pages.
H. Homepage Settings. This is where you will choose what page will be your homepage, and what page will your posts page. WordPress was originally a blogging platform (although now nearly a third of all websites in the United States are build on it). The posts page is where you add your blog posts. You can name it whatever you like (this one is named “Resources,” and you can choose whether to display it or use it at all.
I. Featured Content. This gives you the option of tagging posts as featured content so that they remain at the top of your posts page.
J. Theme Options. The choices here vary from theme to theme. Common options include whether to have a static or scrolling header, and whether to display a title across a header image.
K. AMP. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. Tweaks made here allow pages to load quickly on mobile devices. In most cases, this will be enabled by default. Depending on your theme, you may see “enable AMP” as an option on your posts page. It’s wise to keep AMP enabled. If you’re new, you can feel free to ignore the AMP options in the Appearance Menu. I will explore AMP and CSS in more detail in a future post.
L. Additional CSS. This is another area you can feel free to skip as a beginner. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS basically allows you to override the html on a page to change certain design elements. If you have a theme you like, you can usually design everything visually without ever worrying about this or only using it occasionally.
Substance and Style 