WordPress® for Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 13. Tweaking WordPress Themes

In This Chapter

• Exploring basic CSS

• Defining CSS properties and values

• Setting a new background color

• Creating a header

• Changing fonts

Chapter 11 shows how you can use free WordPress themes in your blog. Many people are quite happy to use these themes without making any adjustments to them at all. I can't tell you, however, how many times people have asked me how they can customize a theme that they've found. They say things like these:

• "I like this free theme I found, but I'd really like to change the header image. How do I do that?"

• "I found this great theme, but I really need to change the background color from black to pink. Can I do that, or do I need to hire someone?"

• "This theme I have is perfect, although I wish I could change the font from Times New Roman to Tahoma. Can you tell me how to do that?"

The practice of changing a few elements of an existing WordPress theme is tweaking. Thousands of WordPress blog owners tweak their existing themes on a regular basis. This chapter provides information on some of the most common tweaks you can make to your theme, such as changing the header image, changing the color of the background or the text links, and changing font styles — and these changes are pretty easy to make, too! You'll be tweaking your own theme in no time flat.

Note

Before you go too wild with tweaking templates, make a backup of your theme so that you have the original files, from which you can easily restore if you need to. You can back ...