In our nine-step series about setting up a blog, we told you that the default WordPress theme would do for starters. This is true, as far as it goes. However, it’s very likely that after a while you’ll want to customise it more radically – or even replace it with another one – to make your blog site a bit more personal to you.
The WordPress default theme
The good thing about the default theme is that it’s very readily customisable – as long as you know what you’re doing with stylesheets and templates. Even if you don’t, there’s still plenty you can do with a little bit of help from the WordPress Codex – a collection of “how-to” guides explaining all about WordPress, including the various template files, functions, and features of WordPress that make it such a flexible blog writing tool.
The only slight annoyance we’ve found with it is when it comes to the stylesheet. As of WP2.8.4 the stylesheet divides elements into:
- basic typography & colours
- structure
- headers
- images
- lists
- forms
- comments
- sidebar
- calendar
- various tags & classes
- captions
This is all very well, as far as it goes – at least there’s some kind of logical structure to it. Unfortunately, there’s a good deal of overlap. For instance, if you want to edit the attributes of a <h2> header in the sidebar, you have to look under “basic typography” if you want to change the font family, weight, size or colour, or under “headers” if you want to change its margins or padding. The one place you wouldn’t look is under “sidebar”.
So be warned – have a good look through the stylesheet before you start editing it, otherwise you may find that your style changes are superseded further down the page.
Other people’s WordPress themes
There are a host of free WordPress themes available for the cost of just a little time and energy spent searching for them. You can find nearly a thousand in the WordPress Free Themes Directory, but a search engine will throw up many more.
These themes are also customisable, of course. The same basic principles apply as for customising the default WP template. However, you may find that it takes less effort to work out how to amend the stylesheet – or considerably more!