3 Ways to Personalize Your WordPress Theme By Mike Paetzold At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

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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