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Customized themes are an essential part of the websites we create and use here at CoreSolutions. While there are literally hundreds of WordPress themes available, none of them fit with the CoreSolutions brand – this is why we have created and customized our own.
In a previous article, I mentioned a few themes that I felt were interesting, including “Adventure Journal” and “Nanoplex Theme”. If you like something about these themes, but not everything, then change it into something that you do like.
There are a few ways that you can do this. As a first step, always backup your WordPress database and WordPress files. No matter how confident you are with making theme changes, sometimes unexpected events happen (power failure), and if you are in the middle of changing your theme, you website might be left in a “broken” state.
Carrying forward, there are a few tools that you can use to modify the theme. By far, the easiest tool to use is the built in WordPress theme editor. The theme editor can be found in the administrative menu, under:
Administration -> Appearance -> Editor
From here, you can edit most of the files on the website including HTML, CSS, PHP, TXT and .htaccess file. These are the files that run your website. It is advisable not to change any of the core WordPress files unless you know what you are doing. The other tool that you can use is any text editor or PHP integrated development environment. Personally, I use NetBeans (http://netbeans.org) as a professional integrated development environment to make changes to the PHP projects. NetBeans is an open-source tool that has roots in the Java field, but has since expanded to provide support for PHP and many other development languages. The choice of the right tool is completely up to you.
Once you’ve selected a tool, you are then free to apply your styling and layout knowledge to adjust your theme to match your needs.
Overall, the process is quite simple and straight forward. I encourage you to go ahead and try this out, you’ll be amazed at the power to personalize your theme and your website.
Mark Phipps
