New Work: WP Theme Adaptations

We’ve just adapted a couple themes for WordPress. It’s so easy, even a dinosaur can do it.

We write a lot about WordPress and blogging. One important trick of the trade is installing a custom theme to give your blog a unique look. Here’s how it works:

1. When you install the WP blog engine, it loads up the default theme, a plain white page with a solid blue header.
2. To give your blog its own flavor, WP provides an ample tool set for using a custom theme.
3. Hundreds (if not thousands) of custom themes exist. Most themes are free or just involve a modest cost. One of the best places to search for themes is the WP Theme Viewer. You can narrow your search by selecting a color, number of columns and lots of other criteria.
4. Select the themes you like best, download them to your computer, then upload them to your server inside the WordPress directory, wp-content/themes subdirectory.
5. Surf up your blog and log in to the admin panel. In WP 2.5 or greater, navigate to the Design tab (in earlier versions, navigate to “presentation”). You’ll see thumbnails of all the themes you have uploaded. Click on the theme you fancy. Presto! Your blog has a new look.

Some themes include a picture in the header. To really jazz up your presentation, you can replace the header picture with one of your own design.

Find the header picture you want to replace. It’s usually in folder labeled “images” inside the theme directory. Sometimes the appropriate file is labeled “header,” other times not. Just have a quick look at the files in the images directory and the header picture should be self-evident.

Load up the header picture in any imaging program such as Photoshop or Fireworks. Design a new header to your own liking, but don’t change the overall dimensions of the picture.

Upload the new header to the appropriate directory on your server replacing the old header (use the same file name). Shazamm! Your new header is now active.

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For our pro bono client SmartGrowthGirl, we used a photo of the author and combined it with an illustration we purchased from iStockphoto. The resulting picture adds personality and uniqueness to the blog, plus tells the story of what the blog is all about. See it here.

We also re-themed our own blog to better match our new website.

For advanced blogging geeks, you can even change the color, typography and layout of the theme by editing the css file. But that’s fort another day.

Our theme for SmartGrowthGirl is adapted from a theme by Nathan Rice called RockinBizRed, available as a free download from Rockin Themes. For our own blog, we adapted a theme called Mushblue by Mukka-Mu.