Wordpress Themes

Webtoy · #1 (**permalink**) 04-19-2008, 06:15 PM

Well, I switched from Blogger to Wordpress a week ago today. However, I am having insane amounts of trouble customising it. I have had my site down for over a week now trying to cutomise my layout, but with no prevail. Does anyone know of good tutorials on making wordpress themes? Or of a blank theme I can just add my own banner to? That's all I need. I have been spending virtually all of my free time trying to fix my problems, but I am thinking of just dropping wordpress all together.

lisa · #2 (**permalink**) 04-20-2008, 02:26 AM

The key with customizing WordPress is learning which files control what area. I spent my first 2-3 weeks really familiarizing myself with all the template files. I'm not a skilled programmer and just know the basics of CSS so at first it was a bit of a challenge.

But I just started breaking it down piece by piece. For example if you see want to change something at the top of your blog, open the header file. If it's a color, chances are it's on your style.css file. For your footer, open the footer.php file.

For images, what you can do is right click the image and view the properties. This will give you the path to the image. For example, this is the path to my blog's main logo

http://blog.2createawebsite.com/wp-c...mages/logo.png

So I know if I want to replace that image I need to upload my new file to that same location with the same name to overwrite that logo.

Try finding a template that doesn't have a lot of images and just customize the logo by overwriting the existing one....

http://themes.wordpress.net/

What exactly is giving you problems? Is it changing an existing image or are you trying to change the size of large areas, etc?

Webtoy · #3 (**permalink**) 04-20-2008, 10:59 AM

Well, specifically I am trying to replace the existing banner with my own banner. I would like to customise more, but all I really need to do is put my banner on there. I just can't figure out the coding enough to know what to take out to remove the existing banner. If I can figure that out, I'll be able to replace it with mine.

DotComBot · #4 (**permalink**) 04-20-2008, 12:32 PM

Hey Webtoy,

If the existing banner on your template is a photo it is merely a matter of replacing the current photo with the image of your banner.

Go into the themes folder and into the folder of your current theme there should be an "images" folder. Inside that will be the current banner (header.jpg or something of the sort) All you have to do is rename your banner with the same name (extension as well) and upload it to replace the current one.

If you are using the default (blue) theme or one that uses a small repeating jpg as the banner image it would probably be easier to switch to one that uses a regular full-size image. If you don't you have to replace code in your header.php or your style.css file. If needed I can walk you through that, but the first way would be much easier.

Hope that helps.

nikkii30 · #5 (**permalink**) 04-21-2008, 10:57 AM

Thanks for the excellent input this helped me out a great deal!!!

Jordy3738 · #6 (**permalink**) 04-22-2008, 11:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Webtoy

I am having insane amounts of trouble customising it.

I was spending insane amount of time on my blog too. I finally got a good friend involved who is very knowledgeable in working with html code and FTP stuff. Even with his expertise we had to reference a video that I found on Youtube. I did find a couple of videos on Youtube that were very helpful. Actually one that referenced exactly how to do what I was trying to accomplish.

Jordy3738 · #7 (**permalink**) 04-22-2008, 11:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Webtoy

Well, specifically I am trying to replace the existing banner with my own banner.

That's what I was doing and here is the video I mentioned that showed me exactly how to do that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DscRa...eature=related

1lear · #8 (**permalink**) 04-23-2008, 03:46 AM

Many of the wordpress templates when you upload and expand them in your control panel have a readme file that usually shows you how to do some modifications you may need---just a thought!

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