What you can do with Wordpress [Part 2 - Themes]

In part one of “What you can do with Wordpress” I examined the very basics, and even talked a little bit about how to activate and use themes, but today we are going to go more in depth with Wordpress development.

Find a theme first

Before you do anything you have to first find a theme that you like. Personally I am a big fan of Michael Heilemann’s K2 theme. It is so customizable and the code is beautiful, however I may be a little biased since I have been using it since I started using Wordpress.

Some of the most popular themes are K2, Cutline, Kiwi, ChaoticSoul, Ambiru, and of course Sandbox. You can find tons of themes here!

Upload/Activate that theme

Once you have found a theme that you like and downloaded it it is time to upload it. This is the easiest part of development. Upload your theme’s folder to wp-content/themes folder.

Once it is uploaded login to you blog and click the Presentation tab and the Themes subtab, there you can activate the theme you just uploaded. Easy.

Now you look like a n00b

Once you have uploaded and activated your theme you are not done, in fact you actually look like everyone else now. Now it is time to edit that theme.

You can edit your blog right in Wordpress, which is what I recommend if you are new at this.

If I were you I would start with your CSS, which is your style and look of your blog. If you are using K2, which you should be, there are tons of tutorials on how to customize. I will throw some links below. But, if you are not using K2 change your blog up a little, change those colors around and your make your fonts different. Anything that you can do to make your blog look “undefault” is great.

Headers

Most good blogs today have a Custom Header option, where you can actually upload and choose what theme you would like to use. However if you do not have this option in your theme, you can go into your CSS and look for this;

#header{
background: #38C url(’pics/header.jpg’);
}

You can change the URL to the picture you wish.

Change those colors and icons

Without getting deeply in depth about CSS and PHP design changing colors and icons is easy. Before I knew anything about design (much like now) I changed my colors and icons.

Anytime you see a “#123″ that is a color that can be changed, go into photoshop and see what that color is and change it to something you would like.

If you see code that says “images/pencil.png” that is an icon. You can look at them by going to the images’ root directory within your theme. I went to FAMFAMFAM.com and downloaded icons packs and decided to change some of my icons with others. Of course you can always create your own.

Useful links

Unfortunately, I can not tell you how to design, I wish I knew myself…but I am going to give you some links that should help your Wordpress design process.

K2 Forums - Great for talking about design and tutorials
Paul’s customizing K2 tutorials (1,2,3,4,5)
Climbing K2 - Parts 1 and 2
Modifying K2 - Parts 1 and 2
3 collumn botton bar
Customizing Wordpress
How to create a custom Scheme
Metadata Manipulation
Chrondata Customization

Next time on “What you can do with Wordpress”

We have covered the basics, and even shown you how to design your blog…next we are going to look at plugins! Stay tuned, you hipsters.