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Anyone who builds their own website or blog will definitely want to learn quickly how to customize Wordpress to style their site and make it how they want it to look. There are some fairly basic things that you can do quickly to turn any Wordpress theme into something more customized and personal.
Change the Theme Header
This is often what most Wordpress site owners will want to do first as this has the greatest impact on how the site will look. By changing the header image at the top of the page for the Wordpress theme that you are using for your website or blog you will instantly change the look and feel of the site and make it more personalized.
Remember that it is the theme that you are changing and if you select a different theme in the future then the header image you see on your site will also change to that which is provided with the new theme.
Changing the image for your Wordpress theme header can be both dramatic and essential in many cases and if you are building your new Wordpress site for you business then getting the branding right is much easier to do with the right images in the header area of your site.
There some very easy ways to do this and some hard ones too. Most modern themes, especially premium Wordpress themes that you have to pay for, will usually have a Theme Options page under the Appearance option in the Wordpress administrators dashboard, where you can quickly go to load your own image or select one of the different ones that are supplied with the theme. The current default Wordpress theme Twenty Eleven is a good example of this.
Other themes such as many of the free themes will not have this option built in and it will be harder for you to change or add an image to the header area of the theme as you will have to change the code in the theme to get it to work, but it still can be done if you know what you are doing.
The other hard part of switching the header image is creating the image in the first place, but if you do not have Adobe Photoshop or a similar image editing software package then you can get one done for you cheaply by using a website such as fiverr.com, so this does not have to be as expensive as you might think. And then once you have your new header image you can simply use your FTP software to upload the new image to your web hosting for your site.
Change the Theme Background Color
Another very popular option for those who want to learn how to customize Wordpress to make their site look different is changing the background color to something different. Once again with many premium themes and other themes, such as Twenty Eleven, there can be an option in the Appearance section of the admin dashboard where you can select a different color for the background of your Wordpress site. In some case you can even select a pattern or other image to use as your background.
The background is the area either side of the main content area on your Wordpress site that is usually just a blank color fill of empty space. Another way to change the background color if your theme does not have this type of option is to edit the theme stylesheet using the Theme Editor in Wordpress admin to change the HTML code for coloring the background. The file you need to edit is usually the style.css file, but to change this you really do need to know what you are doing or you could totally mess up your theme so that your site does not display properly anymore if you get it wrong!
Change the Theme Footer
Pretty much everyone who owns a website will want to add their own copyright notice to the footer area of their blog or website and this is no different for WordPress sites. Often a theme will come with its own copyright line in the footer and then it is pretty easy for you to change it to exactly what you want as the code you will need to change will just normally be some very simple HTML and in most case it is just the text that you are changing. This once again can be done via the Theme Editor option in the admin area within Wordpress and the file you will need to edit is often called footer.php.
You can also add links here to other important pages of your site, such as a Privacy page, Contact page, About page etc, although some people prefer to include these in the main menu at the top of the page, but if there is no space left in your main menu then the footer is a good place to put links to these types of pages.
Also many people will want the year that accompanies the copyright statement to change automatically as the each year goes by so that they do not worry about having to change it every year and here is a post on Changing The Copyright Year that tells you how to do this and provides the code for you to use.
Change the Theme Sidebar
Your theme sidebar is probably one are that you will often change once your new site is up and running as it can be very easily customized through the use of Wordpress sidebar widgets which you manage and control from the Widgets option in the Appearance section of the admin dashboard. And often there will also be widgets that you can use to further customize the footer and header areas of your blog as well.
There are a standard set of widgets that come with Wordpress that you can simply drag and drop into the sidebar for them to appear on your website. These include such things as the Recent Posts widget, a Calendar, Archives, RSS feed, Categories, Links and the Tag cloud. To reverse this process of adding them you just delete them from the sidebar to remove them.
By default when you first install Wordpress you will find that a couple of these widgets will already be installed and you will probably want to remove them at first. These will be the Archives and Meta widgets, with the latter providing you with just a login link. Strangely though if you go and try to find these widgets in the sidebar to remove them they will not be there, as Wordpress hides them from you, although they show up on the site. But just by adding one new widget (even one of the same ones) you will find that they will both disappear.
The most popular widget that you will probably add to the sidebar will be the Text widget, but when you add one then you will see that there is nothing in it and this is deliberate. The text widget is designed for you to add text to be displayed in the sidebar, but it also supports HTML code so you can also use it to display images, adverts, videos and anything else that you want. This also enables you to style (font, color, size etc) any part of the text in any text widget that you add to the side bar as well. For more information on adding widgets and the coding part just read about it at at this How to use Wordpress Widgets post.
Change the Theme Colors
This is often what many people want to do when they start to discover how to customize Wordpress in a big way. Fortunately there are now many good Wordpress themes out there that will allow you to change the colors of most parts of your theme from within the Theme Options area in the dashboard and this of course is the easy way to do it, otherwise you are left with a major coding task to understand and then change the HTML CSS code in the style.css stylesheet file.
Therefore if changing the theme colors is an option that you would like to have in your theme then when you are selecting one for your new Wordpress site, just make sure that it has this facility built into it.
For some great themes that wil allow you to do all the things that are mentioned above justs visit our Recommended Themes page and checkout out some of the great themes that you get get for Wordpress these days.
One really awesome free theme that allows you to change and customize pretty much anything you want is the Flexibility Theme and you should check it out if these features are important to you.
Enjoy customizing your Wordpress theme as it can be a lot of fun!
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