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If you’ve been reading my blog for very long, you’ll know that I’m an inveterate theme changer.  I can’t help it. I see something new and shiny and I just run for it. Colors and images totally turn me on.

My whole family are artists, so it’s no wonder, eh? It’s on my side and my husband’s side, too, so my daughter lucked out with the best art genes from both sides. I just like pretty shapes and colors. Oooh… Ahhh… Drool.

So, when I see a theme that just grabs me… I grab it.

The one I have now isn’t quite my cup of tea. It’s OK, you know. Businessy and such, but it’s really not me.

And you probably feel the same way about your theme or that ubiquitious Kubrick theme that everyone starts out with. You don’t have to be stuck with that!

There are a couple of three or four ways to change it.

You can go into your Design tab and mess with the header colors. Just making them a little different is good. And if you’re not very techy, this is a way you can go right away with no tech acumen whatsoever. You can also have headers made by a graphic artist and just swap out the header image, too. That’s pretty easy to do.

But finding and uploading a new theme is just as simple, really.

Go to http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/ and find a new one that you like and that suits your purpose. You can afford to be a little quirkier with a personal blog, or if your niche is a little quirky. For business blogging, think clean and bright. No black. I know this now, as my friends gave me the smackdown about my last <sigh> really favorite theme.

Once you have the theme, extract the files, and upload it via ftp to your blog’s wp-content/themes folder. Once you have done that, it will appear in your Design area. One really cool feature about WordPress 2.6.x is that it allows you to preview the theme before you actually let it go live.

The only thing about changing your theme that you probably won’t like is that some customizations will have to be re-done. Your widgets should still work, unless you’ve gone from a three-column template to a one-column template, but then, it’s only a matter of rearranging. So, that’s cool.

But if you’ve added any social networking buttons, as I have AddThis, for example, they’ll have to be re-done. Kontera is something else you’ll have to reload into the template. But if you haven’t done any of this stuff… you’re probably good to go.

I know WordPress just keeps making things better and better and they totally rock! But here’s something for my wishlist: When someone chooses a new theme, can’t you magically just make it appear on my blog without having to make all those customizations all over again?

That would be sweet!

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