You only need to change three elements of the site to customize it. The first is of course to remove the ghacks logo and replace it with a logo of your site. To do that you go to /wp-content/themes/Ghacks2/images/logo/ and replace the file ghacksheaderlong.jpg with an image of your choice. Make sure you keep the right size which is a width of 1000 and a height of 142.

The other change is the about text in the sidebar. To change that open the file sidebar.php in /wp-content/themes/Ghacks2/ and search for About Sitename. Change this heading and edit the text just below that line as well to reflect your site.

Ghacks Free WordPress Theme

Ghacks Free WordPress Theme

The last one changes the header navigation. You surely want to add links to your site there which means that you have to open the file header.php in /wp-content/themes/Ghacks2/ and look for the phrase “auto page navigator”. The menu entries start below that line. Simply edit the url and the description. If you have problems doing that let me know and I explain it in detail.

Plugins:

Several plugins have been already implemented in the theme which means that you simply have to install the plugin in WordPress and activate it. There is no code editing involved if you like the way the plugins are played in the theme. I list plugins with a short explanation and link to the developer for easier implementation.

Core Plugins:

  • Advanced Search Lite – If you want to enable site search you need this plugin. As usual, just download the plugin from the above website, ftp it to your plugin directory and activate it in your WordPress plugin administration.
  • CSS Compress – Compresses the css file which speeds up browsing for your visitors and saves bandwidth. As usual, download, ftp and activate in WordPress. No additional work involved.
  • Head Meta Description – Takes an excerpt from the first paragraph and adds it as the meta description.
  • My Avatars – If you want to display avatars next to the comments than you need to download and activate this plugin.
  • Optimal Title – probably the most important plugin for search engine rankings. Just install and activate.
  • Spam Karma – the antispam plugin that I’m using. If you use another plugin keep using it, don’t think that makes much of a difference.
  • Subscribe to Comments – Gives your visitors the option to subscribe to comments to receive an email whenever a new comment appears in the article.
  • WP Cache – If you have a high traffic blog you need this plugin which caches pages for a certain amount of time reducing database load immensely. You need to turn of GZip compression in your options though to be able to use this plugin.
  • Page Navi – Uses numbers instead of previous and next in the page navigation. Just activate the plugin, everything else is set.
  • Dropdown Cats – Displays the categories in a neat dropdown menu in the sidebar.

More info: Ghacks.net


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