Appearance

The Appearance section is where you control the overall look and feel of your blog/website.

Themes
If you go to the Appearance section, you will see a number of images that highlight different themes you can use for your blog.

Click on any of the over 100+ themes available for a preview of what your site will look like with this theme. If you like it, click Activate in the upper right-hand corner, or close the preview by clicking the X in the left-hand corner and preview another. Once you’ve selected the new theme, click on “Visit site” next to your blog title at the top of the admin screen to see how you like the new look.

Widgets
If your theme allows Widgets, you will see a “Widgets” link in the menu under appearance. Widgets allow you to alter what appears in the sidebars and footers of your blog.

WordPress widgets are content elements that can be added to the sidebar of your blog or website. For example, there are widgets that include Delicious bookmarks, Flickr photos, etc. Depending on the theme, you can also further customize the look and feel of your blog/website. Some themes allow you to add a custom image header and other features.

By default, your right side bar will have items such as Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Archives and Categories. These sections will automatically populate as people begin posting and commenting on your blog. However, you may also find it useful to add other widgets to the sidebar, which you can do simply by dragging items from the “Available Widgets” box over to the “Primary Widget Area” box on the right side. You can also change the order that the widgets appear by dragging and dropping within the “Primary Widget Area” box.

Some widgets that you might find especially useful:

• Authors – This widget gives a list of all the authors who are registered on the blog. It also allows you to quickly click on an author to see all of that author’s posts. This is useful if you have a class in which each student will post many items and you’d like to get a snapshot of an individual student’s work.
• Links – Displays the items you’ve entered in the Links section.
• Tag Cloud – Shows the tags that have been attached to posts on the blog, with more frequently-used tags appearing larger.
• Text – This allows you to plug in any text or HTML code that you’d like to appear in the sidebar.

Menus
Most themes place all of your pages in your blog’s top menu by default, but custom menus allow you to override the default top menu settings of the blog or create secondary navigation sections that you can place in the sidebar with Widgets. You can create menus that will link to any page, post, category, tag, or outside link that you’d like.

These options can be found by clicking the Menus link under Appearance.

Start by giving your menu a name in the “Menu Name” field. Then use the Custom Links, Pages and Categories boxes to create new menu items.

• Custom Links – This option allows you to create a link to anything on the web. Simply paste the URL from any web page into the “URL” field, then use the “Label” field to give a short designator that will show up in the actual menu, and click the Add to Menu button. You can also use this box to create links to specific posts from your blog, or to all the posts that fall under a specific tag. Just navigate to the item on your blog, copy the URL and paste it in like you would for an external link.
• Pages – Use the checkboxes to select any page that you’ve created on your blog, and then click the Add to Menu button. The full title of the page will show up in the menu, so you may want to keep your page titles short. (You can also use the “Custom Links” option as a workaround.)
• Categories – Use the checkboxes to select any category that you’ve added to your blog, then click the Add to Menu button. The title of the category will automatically show up in the menu.

IMPORTANT: Whenever you’re done editing a menu, be sure to click the blue Save Menu button or else your changes will not be saved.

Once you’re done, you can replace the top menu on your blog with your new custom menu by using the “Primary Navigation” dropdown menu in Theme Locations box in the top left corner of the page. You can also go to Widgets and drag your custom menus into any of the available widget locations.