WordPress: How To Make Small Customizations

I don’t think it’s a secret that I love, love, love WordPress. I think it’s a fantastic tool for creating websites. (yes – this website is built in WordPress!)

First of all, WordPress is free. And who doesn’t love free business tools? Second of all, it’s easy to get started, as there are lots of free themes available for you to use. There are pre-designed ‘templates’ of sorts. You really don’t have to do any design work to get your site started.

While it is okay to use these, I do recommend that you make at least a few small customizations. You want your website to match the personality of your business and your brand as much as possible. That can be hard if you are using a standard theme.

Widgets are far and away the easiest and most common way to customize a blog theme. There are literally thousands of widgets available and they do everything from mark comments as Spam to set your site up for social bookmarking. There are widgets which show a quote of the day, allow people to make a donation, or monitor the statistics of your blog.

In order to add a widget to your blog theme you must first make sure it is widgetized or ready to receive widgets. If it isn’t, you can make widgetize it and the steps to take are found on the WordPress website.

Once you’ve determined which widgets you’d like to add, and that your theme is able to include them, and then it’s simply a matter of downloading the widget and customizing it. Each widget has different options depending on its function.

To find widgets which are available for your theme, start by logging into your blog and getting into your administrative panel. Choose your ‘Design’ option and there you will see a ‘widgets’ option. This will show you what widgets are readily available for your theme and may also provide a widget search function so you can find other relevant widgets to customize your blog theme.

Changing colors of a WordPress theme can seem intimidating at first, but is actually pretty easy. Quite often a theme will come with color options, particularly if you’re using a theme provided by your website host. If your theme didn’t come with an option to customize the colors you can get into the CSS, Cascading Style Sheet, and edit the colors.

The good news is that colors are identified by numbers, for example #F7BE81 is a peachy color. You can find the codes for colors by viewing the colors of your favorite sites or search for HTML Color Codes online – there are a number of tools to generate the right color code. Once you have your code, you simply need to get into the code of your theme and change the colors. To get into the code of your theme, in your administrative panel you will see a ‘Design’ option. Under that menu there will be a few choices including, widgets, theme, and theme editor. Click on ‘theme editor’ and your code will appear. Now you can edit the colors using the appropriate color codes.
Font. Using the same ‘theme editor’ as described in the above, you can change the font, font size, and font formatting like bold, italics, font color and so on. This is a good way to help brand your business.

Graphics are perhaps one of the most significant ways to integrate your personality into your blog. This is commonly done by changing the header. Many themes make it easy to customize your header by walking you through an upload process where you can upload graphics and/or photos into your blog’s header. Again, you can also get into the theme editor and change the header however that is a more advanced coding project.

There are many small and easily manageable changes you can make to your WordPress theme to make your blog represent your personality and your brand image. Colors, widgets, and simple formatting make a world of difference both to you and your visitors.