Customizing your blog’s look with Wordpress themes
I bet that choosing a “look” for your blog was one of the first things you did the first time you logged in. This entry might even be superfluous considering that changing the “look” of your Wordpress blog is one of the easiest things to do.
Nevertheless, for those who haven’t discovered it yet, you can change your blog’s theme by clicking on the “Presentation” tab in the main menu of your Wordpress dashboard. On the themes page, you will find a list of all available themes, including screenshots. Pretty nifty, huh? The screenshots give you an idea of how your blog will look with each theme.
Can you create your own theme? If you can work with HTML and CSS (cascading style sheets), and if you are familiar with Wordpress PHP language, you can. Actually, it isn’t that hard although customizing, modifying and tweaking an already existing theme might be easier for beginners. If you will look at the available themes on your “Presentation” page, you will notice a black, white and red theme with those gorgeous eyes on the header…
It’s called Flirtatia and it was the first Wordpress theme I ever did. My big mistake was the footer. The Flirtatia credit link goes to frankly-feminine.com, a domain I have not used in a long, long time.
Flirtatia was a modification of a theme called Thought Mechanics. In the footer of every web page, I retained the credit to the original author and, right in the CSS (that’s the page that defines how the various portions of a web page appears on the screen), I put in the names and web addresses of all web designers whose ideas helped me create Flirtatia. You won’t be able to view this on your “Presentation” page (you would if we were using Wordpress instead of WordpressMU but that’s too much work) but just to show you…
Respect, you know, and attribution. Giving credit where credit is due. I have a few other themes, if you’re interested. Just to show you that you don’t have to be an IT graduate to understand some basic techy stuff.
When you’re ready to create your own theme, we’ll talk more about attribution and credits.
For additional reading, check out Small Potato’s tutorials on creating Wordpress themes. If you’re wondering who Small Potato is, well… I don’t know except that he’s a darn good web designer. We’re using a modified version of his Quadruple Blue theme in the HEdCen main site.