3 Ways To Personalize Your WordPress Theme

Jan 02, 2009 in information

3 Ways To Personalize Your WordPress Theme

One of the great things about WordPress is the number of themes that are available to change the look of your blog. There are both free and paid versions available. Changing themes is quite easy but…

Finding just the right theme to fit your blog can be frustrating. And that is putting it mildly.

You find one that you like just about everything but that one little thing.

It may be…

the way it displays hyperlinks
the size of the sidebar
the header image
or any of numerous other problems

Now short of hiring someone to create a custom theme exactly the way you would like it there are a few easy changes you can make to take the almost perfect theme and make it much more YOURS.

Here is how you can change three of the most common things to personalize your them and make it your own.

Before we start though ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS have a back up of your files. And I do mean always if you did not guess from the previous statement.

Change your header

In your theme folder you will find an img or images folder depending on which one the theme author used. Inside that folder will be an image called header.jpg or header.gif. You can easily grab a copy of that image and check to see exactly what size it is.

Either create a new image the same size your self or hire a graphic designer to create one for you if you lack the skills. Name this new file the same as the original one and replace the original one. You now have a personalized header.

Hyperlink colors

Just the other day a friend of mine had found the perfect theme for his blog but the hyperlinks were not the standard blue and underlined but they were just black and bold.

He loved the theme except for that and had spent hours finding just the right look. This problem was easily solved by making a minor change in the css (cascading style sheet) file of his theme.

WordPress themes are run using style sheets and you can change the attributes quite easily. In this case it was the hyperlinks so you needed to look on the style sheet for the “a link” attributes.

It will look something like this

a {
color: #000000;
text-decoration: none;
}

Just change the color to the appropriate hexadecimal code in this case #0000ff and then the attribute from none to underline and you have a “standard” hyperlink.

Changing sidebar size

This takes two changes and they have to be the same amount of change. If your sidebar is a bit narrow say 120 pixels and you want to use 125×125 buttons you will have to change the sidebar width and reduce the body width by the same amount.

Here are the two entries

#sidebar {
position: relative;
float: right;
width: 237px;

#content {
float: left;
width: 676px;

You need to subtract from one what you add to the other but this will allow you to customize the size of a sidebar if that is the feature that you don’t like.

WordPress themes can be easily customized to your needs so if you find most of the features you want try your hand at customizing them. Just make sure to have a backup before you start.

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Mike Paetzold is known as an expert on using WordPress for your marketing solutions. You can find other items to improve your WordPress look, feel and usage at Advanced WordPress or more WordPress information at his blog.
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Technorati Tags: editing themes, personalize themes, style sheets, wordpress themes

WordPress Plugin and Theme questions answered

Sep 09, 2008 in questions

Today’s question:

I had a question about Plug-Ins and Themes where
do you find these at.Does Word Press have them
available and are they free or do they cost.

The answer to the second part is YES to all. Sorry it is the impish side that started this post with that answer. Now to the details.

You can find themes (some are free and some are paid) by doing a quick search on Google. There are quite a few free ones available at the WordPress Theme directory.

Now a bit about themes. The free themes almost always require a link back to the designer or someone that paid for the theme development or both. Not all themes work well so sometimes you get an easy to use theme and other times you get quite frankly a piece of crap. So beware and test the theme before using it.

Now to plugins you can do the same. If I am looking to add a particular functionality to a blog I will go to Google and input “Function WP plugin” and usually find something to do that in the first few results.

WordPress does have it’s directory of free plugins that are submitted to their service and these will be what show for automatic update in your dashboard. You can access it at Plugin Directory and this am when I checked they had 2,874 plugins listed.

Like the themes most work well but some are crap. Some also interfere with other plugins so always add them one at a time.

There are also plugins that are paid. Usually these will do very specific tasks and may or may not be worth the cost. I have bought and use a few for specific tasks like creating light box pops and adding automated affiliate links for specific blogs.

Hope that helps and answers your question.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

P.S. Will try and review the new WordPress 2.6.2 later today time permitting. Have not had a chance yet to play with it.

Technorati Tags: finding plugins, finding themes, wordpress, wordpress plugins, wordpress themes

Theme clutter, site maps, hmmm?

May 27, 2008 in questions

Today’s question:

Does or should a Blog have a sitemap? I see too many blogs that are all over the place in their design. I want to be able to follow some kind of “order with a purpose” in designing my blog but not too busy that it drives traffic away. It seems as though there is a delicate balance here, right.

A very good question but I think you don’t quite have the terminology quite right.

I do recommend that you use a sitemap plugin so that you can automate the spidering of your site. I do not use a sitemap for people to read.

One of the things that WordPress does quite well is to organize the navigation of your blog. The more tightly targeted your content is to a single subject the better a blog performs with a few exceptions.

One of the things I like to do especially for my niche blogs is to pick out the major areas I want to emphasize and use them for categories. If you are dealing with a very specific topic this will probably give you between 4 -10 categories. These would be your upper level keywords you want to target.

Now if you are doing a general blog like I do with my name blog it can end up being many more because it tends to be more eclectic and cover a much wider range of topics. (Not something I recommend except for name blogs.)

If I understand your real question and unfortunately this means I have to use that ass/u/me word, you are looking for a checklist more for your side bar so that it doesn’t become too overwhelming.

The key will be how you are using the blog and what your monetization is. For most I use something like this but it does vary from topic to topic.

Lead capture form - If you have followed me at all you know why.
Pages - this is where I will have things like about but it will depend on the theme as this theme lists pages in a top header so this would be redundant on this particular theme.
Categories
Recent posts
Recent Comments
Links
Subscribe Me
Tag cloud

That would be the basics but if you use things like My Blog Log I would use their widget too.

The key though is not to copy the order but see what your primary goal is. If it was to attract people to my links then that would move up as an example. It really depends on your own goals and testing and tweaking to see what gets the most attention and putting your primary goal in that position.

Hope this helps as I hate answering questions where I use that ass/u/me word. If not resubmit or leave a comment here and we can continue the conversation.

As always your comments and questions are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

P.S. I just updated the 7 Tips book and if you have bought it before you need to login and download the latest version.

Technorati Tags: side bar, sitemap, theme, themes, wordpress theme, wordpress themes

Which theme is best for SEO?

May 06, 2008 in questions

Today’s question:

What’s the best theme to use for SEO. I saw site at SEO-Themes.com. So are some themes better optimized for SE’s or can I just add plugins that will even out the playing field?

First I went over and looked quickly at their site. They don’t say what they do different just that they have tweaked the themes. I did not take the time to download one and look through it to see what changes they are making.

As I can and do get great results using plugins that has been how I do it. Title tags and targeting the right keywords has been the primary factors in getting good rankings.

I have tested this on more than one occasion and a good title tag can make a huge difference in the ranking of a post for a specific keyword.

Using All In One SEO allows you to customize the title tags and that along with the XML Sitemap plugin are the prime ones for ranking and getting indexed.

You do need to actually use it and quite often I use one title for the post and a different one for the title tag.

Now as to what makes a good theme. I really like themes that are documented with notes inside. As a general rule if the person writing the theme has left good notes they usually have created a good theme.

More than once I have tried a new theme and usually the ones thta have had performance issues aren’t documented well at all. The same has been true of other script too. This is something that the better coders around always document what is what because it makes it easier to update.

Unfortunately, you will only be able to tell this after you have downloaded the theme and in my case usually installed it. (Have lots of excess themes on my hard drive.)

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold