So, I knew that I wanted to change my theme, but I was dreading the almost inevitable I’m-in-way-over-my-head-here outcome.  I’m usually pretty good at figuring things out on my own, but how far was a fairly decent working knowledge of HTML going to get me?  As it turned out, I had nothing to worry about, as the whole process went quickly and easily, thanks in large part to the creators of my new theme, Template Lite.

First I needed to chose my new theme, which of course takes forever.  They all start to look same after a while, don’t they?  And everyone around you quickly tires of, “So, what do you think of this one?”  Finally, I found one that I liked, that could do what I wanted, and didn’t appear ready to bring great buggy disaster down upon my blog.

I needed to install a new plug-in first, flickrRSS, for the Flickr photostream at the bottom of the page, and that was simple enough.  Download, activate the plug-in, and configure the settings.  Then I just copied a bit of code onto my footer template, and it was done.  Very nice, thank you to Dave Kellam and Stefano Verna for the cool plug-in.

Then I was ready to hit the download theme button, as I mumbled a little prayer to the technology gods to please be kind.  I received a folder that I uploaded into my blog directory (in wp-content/themes).  My only confusion came when it took me several minutes to figure out that I couldn’t upload the entire folder at once, but needed to create empty like-named folders in my blog directory first, then upload just the files into their appropriate new folders.  Feel free to chuckle if this seems obvious to you, but it threw me at first.  At any rate, it was then smooth sailing, as I just chose the new theme that appeared as a choice, and Presto!

Well, anyway, I hope that you like the new theme as much as I do.  I’ve heard some truly frightening theme-changing stories, but my experience was great.  Template Lite has a number of nice free themes that don’t just look like everyone else’s, so if you’re looking, they’re a good resource to check out.  I’d definitely give them a good review.