Sep | 15 | 2006

Tweaking your WordPress layout (intro)

Posted by Professor as Blog Tutorial, Design and Themes, Templates, Terminology, Tips

WordPress theme hacking is quite fun. You could experiment with so many things like CSS and images. You would like to customize your blog in such a way that it does not look overdone. You could strike a balance in how you decorate your blog. Or accessorizing if you like putting widgets

Of images and headers

Many of the WordPress themes have space for header images. To customize some themes, there are those who opt to edit the header so that they could make it personal. The header is something that they use to show their personality or interests. The Japan Blog uses a nice theme with lots of parasols. Anyhow, when you download your chosen theme, read the notes included in it. There are usually notes as to where you could find things you could easily customize, like the header. Sometimes, you could find them in the CSS files. Make sure you read the comments. They would be commonly seen in the #header part of the CSS file.

Color changes
In the case of the Kubrick (default in WordPress), you have options to change the header colors. But in any case, you’d have to learn a bit of CSS in order to do that. You could easily change font colors by changing the attributes in the file. Just look for all those with h1’s, h2’s and the li’s and a’s. The other tags might be more difficult to search.

Images on the sidebar
Sometimes you might like to add images on the sidebar. Maybe your very own profile or maybe a few buttons to link to other sites that you like visiting or stuff you recommend. Try looking for the file sidebar.php in your theme folder. Edit that file and add the proper tags like the img tag and the a tag (if you want to link to something).

Where do you edit these things?

You could even do this while you are logged on to WordPress and just fire up the theme editor from your dashboard. How easy is this? Log in. Then click Presentation. From the presentation menu you would get to Themes and Theme editor. Select Theme Editor. Actually you could select which theme to edit from the Theme Editor part.

Sounds easy, right? There’s so much more you could do with WordPress. Just watch out for the updates on this blog!

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