January 20, 2014 WordPress Theme Customization You should have your theme installed and are ready to customize it to the options you want. The reason you picked out the theme you wanted is because it looked great in the picture or demo before you installed it, now you are wondering why it doesn’t look like that. You have to set up a few options and put some content into the “blocks”. One great thing about wordpress is that just about everything is uniformly structured so that putting things in and out is very easy to figure out and understand. Themes are one of the things that aren’t uniform, each theme seems to have different customization options. Here is a quick video on basic theme customization: Digging around the theme options show in the video when you go to Appearance>you see all the options that you can edit. I will go over each one by one now, remember themes vary and there may be more options. Appearance>themes: you have been here before this is where you choose, uploaded and installed your theme. If you mouse over your theme it says theme details, click to go into some custom theme options. Appearance>customize is what you saw in the video where you can adjust main items like site title, colors, header, background, navigation and static front page. Lets leave static front page to latest posts until you are more comfortable with designing pages. The others you can play around with to see what effects it has on your site. Appearance>widgets is where all the fun stuff goes. This is the area where you put fun widgets or plug ins into different areas of your site, like sidebars, footers, headers. Some examples of widgets and plug ins are facebook and twitter streams, instagram picture sliders, contact forms, custom info like bio and pics, advertising, menus, recent posts or categories. Basically if you can think of something there is a widget, plug in, code, text or picture you can put into these areas. Appearance>menus this is where you create your navigation menus, there is a tab at the top edit menus where you create a menu and then you can add pages(you create), links(to other areas of your site or external links to other sites), categories(you create these and categorize your posts or content) and there are other options sometimes created by plug ins for items like ecommerce pages and products, classified ads, etc. Click the box on a couple items and add them to menu, name your menu and save it. Another tab at the top is manage locations(if you theme has multiple locations to have menus, assign your newly created and named menu to one or more locations and save menu. You can view your page to see you new menus. Next should be appearance>(your theme name) options this is where all uniformity goes out the window. Some themes have a few basic options and some have pages and pages of options to alter change and adjust every little aspect of your site. Since I don’t know which theme you have so I cant go over options with you now, but the more you get into customizing the more you will understand what each option does. Appearance>header gives you a few options to do with adjusting your header(top of your site) from colors to images. Appearance>background will let you adjust colors, texture or pics(you have to upload) . Appearance>editor this is an area where someone who is NOT experienced in computer coding should go, ever. If you alter any of the coded pages without knowing exactly what you are doing you WILL crash your site and may lose everything. In my next article I’m going to go over some of the items in the appearance>(your theme name) options. Things that will help you adjust colors and fonts in certain parts of you site because the basic ones just aren’t any fun.