Customising the theme of your WordPress website: Introduction

A guide written for talk about local by Najm Clayton:

The following group of three tutorials demonstrate ways of customising the look of a WordPress theme. They are aimed at current WordPress users who would like to make changes to their theme but are not familiar with website coding.

There are many reasons why someone may want to modify a WordPress theme they are using but some typical examples may include:

• To make a generic theme unique
• To improve the branding
• To make a WordPress theme fit seamlessly with a current website

As current WordPress users may be aware a WordPress site can be hosted with wordpress.com or self hosted on another server (using wordpress.org). There are a number of advantages to self hosting, such as easy access to the sites files and the option to use custom built WordPress themes. However the changes covered in this first tutorial can be carried out under either of these conditions.

PLEASE be aware though that CSS changes on a wordpress.com site are not permanent unless you have paid for the upgrade (about $15 per blog per year at the time of writing).

All three tutorials use the Twenty Ten 1.1 theme but the principles can be applied to any theme.

All the tutorials use the standard styles found in the majority of WordPress themes.

Click here to go to Customising the theme of your WordPress website: Tutorial One.