Behind every WordPress blog is a theme that controls the look and layout of the blog. As I explain in “Make a Website, Changing the Look and Layout with a WordPress Theme,” you can change the entire look and layout of your WordPress blog by installing and activating a different theme.

Every theme contains one or more CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Each stylesheet contains codes that tell Web browsers how to display particular elements on your blog, including text, images, sidebars, headers, and footers. CSS codes are structured something like this:

selector { property: value; }

The selector indicates the element that the style applies to (such as a heading, paragraph, or image), the property defines the aspect of the object that will be modified (such as its color or alignment), and the value defines the setting for the property (such as blue or center). Here’s an example:

h3 {color: #0033FF; font-size: 22px; font-family: Arial; padding-bottom: 20px; }

This “style” tells Web browsers to display any text formatted as a Heading 3 (using the HTML tag <h3>) as blue, 22 pixels, Arial followed by 20 pixels of blank space below it.

As you’re composing blog entries, any text you format as a Heading 3 will be formatted according to the CSS property values assigned to it. You can change the appearance of all Heading 3 items in your blog simply by editing the h3 entry in your blog’s stylesheet as explained later in this post.

Tip
For a list of CSS properties and values associated with each property, check out the W3 School’s CSS Reference.

Understanding CSS Selectors

A CSS selector indicates the type of object each property value is applied to. Common selectors include…

• p for paragraphs
• img for images
• h1, h2, h3, h4, h5… for headings
• ul for unnumbered (bulleted) lists
• ol for numbered lists
• li for items in a list

This is pretty simple stuff, but CSS complicates things by allowing for a couple different types of selectors, as described in the following sections.

Tip
You can group selectors to apply property values to two or more elements. For example, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 {color:blue; } would make all headings numbered 1-5 blue.

Class Selectors

A class selector enables you to create multiple style rules for a given element. For example, you can create three paragraph classes – p.left {text-align: left}, p.center {text-align: center}, and p.right {text-align: right}. When composing your blog entry, you can add the class attribute to a paragraph’s opening tag to specify which class you want to apply, for example ><p class=”center”>.

You can also create a class that is not associated with any given element by omitting the element designation from the selector. For example, you can create a .center {text-align: center} class, which you can then apply to any text element, such as paragraphs, images, headings, addresses, and definitions. For example, <img class=”center” src=”http://www.mydomain.com/images/image.jpg” /> would center an image while <p class=”center”> would center a paragraph.

ID Selectors

ID selectors are similar to class selectors, but they use a pound sign (#) instead of a period and apply formatting to only a single occurrence of a specific element. For example, you can apply p#footer {font-size: small; font-style: italic} to a paragraph at the bottom of a page to display the paragraph as a footer in small, italic text.

Some theme designers use the ID selector to apply different formatting for different sections of the blog; for example, #content li to control the appearance of list items in the content area and #l_sidebar li to control the appearance of list items in the left sidebar.

CSS Comments

Most WordPress stylesheets include comments that serve no other purpose than to provide information to anyone who may want to edit the file, including you. Comment text is marked with a forward slash followed by an asterisk, like this:

/* This is a comment. */

Comments usually designate groups of CSS formatting codes. For example, the designer may include a comment before each group of codes that apply to the header, footer, and content area. You can learn a great deal about how a designer formatted particular elements by reading the comments.

Tip
It’s a good idea to insert a comment describing any changes you make to your blog’s stylesheet, so you can easily change the setting back if something goes wrong. At least make a note of any changes.

Editing Styles in WordPress

You can edit your blog’s stylesheet and other files that comprise the theme you’re using from within WordPress. Here’s what you do:

• Log in to WordPress as you normally do. The WordPress Dashboard appears.
• Click Appearance and then Editor. The contents of your blog’s stylesheet should appear. If it doesn’t, click the Stylesheet link under Styles.
• Edit the styles as desired. (Editing styles is like editing any text document.)
• Click the Update File button to save your changes.

Editing Styles in Thesis

If you’re using the Thesis theme (which I use on this blog as well as most of the blogs I manage), editing styles is a little more complicated at first, but after you learn the basics, managing your styles with Thesis is actually easier. The difference is that Thesis discourages users from editing the stylesheet directly. Instead, you leave the stylesheet as is and enter any changes in a separate Thesis custom stylesheet. This way, if you make a mistake, you know exactly where to find it – in the custom stylesheet.

Tip
The Thesis how-to manual tells you to download the file you want to edit, open it in a text editor, make your changes, and then upload the file. A better way is to install the Thesis OpenHook plugin.

With Thesis OpenHook, you can edit the custom stylesheet from WordPress rather than having to open the custom.css file in a separate editor. After installing and activating OpenHook, click Appearance in the WordPress Dashboard, click Thesis OpenHook, and then scroll down to the Custom Stylesheet box to view or edit the contents of custom.css.

If you don’t like that idea, consider using your hosting service’s file manager. In Bluehost (the hosting service I use), you can login, click File Manager, and use it to navigate to the folder that contains the custom.css file: /wp-content/themes/thesis-15/custom. You can then click the custom.css file and click the Edit button in the toolbar at the top to open the file in the Bluehost Text Editor and make your changes online. I’ve used GoDaddy, and it has its own editor, too. Other tools are available that simplify the process of editing files online.

Using the Custom Stylesheet

To use the custom stylesheet, log into WordPress and then click Appearance, Thesis Options, Custom Stylesheet, and make sure Use custom stylesheet is checked. With the custom stylesheet enabled, you can use the “custom” class selector to override any existing style for any selector.

Tip
Before editing custom.css, check the Thesis Options and Design Options settings to determine whether you can make your adjustments using the Thesis built-in control panels. You can make dozens of adjustments without having to edit the custom.css file.

Sample Edits

Here are some of the easy changes I made to my custom.css file for my personal blog at joekraynak.com/blog (above each is a comment explaining what the new CSS declaration does):

/*Remove padding above and to left of header*/
.custom #header { padding-top: 0; padding-left: 0; }

/*Indent the tagline in the header 130px*/
.custom #tagline { position: absolute; left: 130px; }

/*When images are left-aligned add no extra space to the left, top, or bottom but 1em space to the right*/
.custom img.alignleft { margin: 0 1em 0 0; }

/*Separate list items by 10px space in the content area – does not affect list items in sidebars*/
.custom #content li { padding-bottom: 10px; }

/*Reduce the space between widgets in the sidebars*/
.custom li.widget { margin-bottom: 10px; }

Tip
Before you can change the property of a selector, you need to know what the selector is, and finding out can be a real challenge. One of the best tools to use to identify selectors is an add-on program for Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser called Firebug.

You can download a free copy of Firefox and then download and install Firebug using the Firefox browser. Kristarella.com has posted an excellent video called “How to Use Firebug for CSS,” demonstrating how to use the Firefox/Firebug combo to examine and experiment with CSS selectors, properties, and values on your own blog as well as other people’s blogs.

After installing WordPress, one of the first things you should do is make sure the blog title and tagline are correct and that the author name for your posts is exactly how you want it to appear. In this post, I show you how to access and change crucial WordPress settings:

1. In your Web browser, type the address of your blog, followed by a forward slash and wp-admin and press Enter. For example, you might type yourdomain.com/blog/wp-admin and press Enter. The WordPress Dashboard appears.
2. Click Settings.



3. Make sure the blog title and tagline are as you want them to appear in your blog header and click Save Changes. (Even if you use a header image instead of text, the blog title and tagline are important for search engines.)



4. Under Settings, click Permalinks.
5. Select Custom Structure, type /%category%/%postname%.html in the text box and click Save Changes. This displays the title of the blog post in its address rather than just a number. For example, instead of displaying http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=123 in the address bar, the address may appear as http://www.yourdomain.com/wildlife/save-rain-forests.html.



6. Click Users.



7. Rest the mouse pointer on your username and click Edit.



8. In the Nickname box, highlight admin, type the name you want to appear whenever you post an entry, and click Save Changes.



9. Open the Display name publicly as drop-down list and click the new nickname you created.



10. Under Contact Info, make sure WordPress is set up to send notifications to the correct email address you want to use.



11. Click Save Changes.

In this series, I’ve been teaching the basics of making a combination website/blog using Bluehost, WordPress, and Thesis. Here’s what I’ve covered so far:

• In Part I: Starting with Bluehost, I showed you how to open a Bluehost account, register your own domain name, and install WordPress.
• In Part II: Changing the Look and Layout with a WordPress Theme, I discussed WordPress themes and showed you how to transform the look and layout of your website/blog simply by selecting a different theme.
• In Part III: Essential WordPress Plugins, I introduced you to WordPress plug-ins – small programs that add features to WordPress – and revealed my eight favorite plugins.

In this part, I finally get around to showing you how to create a static home page in WordPress, so your blog can act like a website and vice versa. When people go to your site, they’ll be greeted by whatever you choose to include on your static home page and can then click a tab to access your blog. With recent versions of WordPress, the process is pretty simple (requires WordPress 2.3.1 or later):

1. Create the page you want to appear as your home page. (Make sure it’s a page, not a post.)



2. Scroll down to the Discussion options and remove the checks next to Allow comments and Allow pings.



3. Click the Publish button to publish your new page.
4. Create and publish a blank page to use for your blog, and call it something like Blog or Nick’s Blog, whatever.



5. In the WordPress Options or Settings group (on the Administration panel), click Reading.



6. Under Front page, click the Static page option.



7. Open the Front page list and choose the page you want to use as your static home page.
8. Open the Post page list and choose the page you want to use to display your blog posts.
9. Save your changes.

If you’re using Thesis, you need to choose to have new pages displayed as tabs in the navigation bar:

1. On the WordPress Administration panel, click Appearance, Thesis Options.



2. Under Navigation Menu click the plus sign next to Select pages to include in nav menu.



3. Check the box next to the blog page you created. Do not check the box next to the new home page you created. As long as you have the option checked to show the home link in the nav menu (see the following step), a tab for the page will appear.(Optional) In the list of pages, you can drag pages up or down to rearrange the order they will appear in your navigation bar.
4. Click the plus sign next to Home Link and make sure the Show home link in nav menu option is checked. You can edit the link’s name to something different for the link than you used for the page name.



5. Click the Save button.

Your new static home page now opens whenever someone chooses to go to your site, and they can click your new Blog tab to go to your blog.

You’ll find other tutorials about this topic that recommend creating a separate template, which you can do if you want to give your home page a unique appearance, but I think most folks just want to have a static page with some unique content to greet visitors.

For more about using Thesis to design your website or blog, check out Redesigning My WordPress Blog with Thesis.

This completes my four-part series on creating a combination website/blog with Bluehost, WordPress, and Thesis, but I’m not quite finished yet. In future posts, I’ll be introducing the basics of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and showing you how to make some additional modifications to your blog. Although you can blog without knowing anything about HTML and CSS, knowing the basics can help you troubleshoot common problems and tweak your blog design to suit your tastes.

In my previous post, “Make a Website, Starting with Bluehost,” I showed you how to sign up with Bluehost, register your own unique domain name, set up an email account on that domain, and install the WordPress blogging platform. With WordPress, you can instantly begin posting content on the Web and establishing your own Internet presence. You can also create a combination website/blog, which is the ultimate goal of this series.

In this post, I show you how to completely change the layout and appearance of your WordPress blog by changing its theme. A theme is a collection of computer code that functions behind the scenes to control the function and formatting of your blog.

Finding and Choosing a WordPress Theme

Numerous talented people, and some untalented ones, have designed themes for WordPress, most of which are free for the taking. As I’m writing this, WordPress boasts a collection of nearly 800 themes. To check them out, head to the Free Themes Directory at WordPress.org.

Upon arrival, choose one of the following options to track down a theme (scroll down the page to access the different options):

• Search: Click in the search box, type one or more tags to describe what you’re looking for, and click Search Themes. By “tags,” I mean things like “blue 2-column” or “silver 3-column custom header.” (For a complete list of tags, click More Info in the navigation bar on the left and then scroll down the page.)
• Featured Themes: The directory always lists a collection of about fifteen featured themes.
• Most Popular: Choosing a popular theme is usually a safe bet. Themes are usually popular for a reason, actually two reasons – it looks good and has fewer problems than less popular themes.
• Newest Themes: If you’re looking for something fresh, check out the newest themes on the block.
• Most Recently Updated: The most recently updated themes are probably in the process of working out some bugs, which may prove that they’re buggy or just show you that the designer cares enough to keep the theme updated.

Looks aren’t everything. A theme can have the right look but be coded inefficiently making it buggy or difficult to customize. Unfortunately, you can’t tell just by looking at the theme or its description. When previewing a theme, be sure to check out what others have said about it. You’ll may have to try a few themes before you hit on one that has the right combination of good looks and performance.

Downloading a WordPress Theme

After you find a theme you like, the next step is to download it. This is pretty easy. You just click the Download button and follow instructions to copy the theme to your computer.

Tip: Consider creating a separate WordPressThemes folder on your hard drive and storing all of your downloaded themes in this folder.

Uploading Your Theme

Themes are stored as compressed (zipped) files, so you want to decompress the file before uploading it. To unzip the file, take the following steps:

1. Open the folder in which you saved the theme file you just downloaded.
2. Right-click the zipped theme folder and click Extract All.
3. Follow the onscreen instructions to complete the operation.

Assuming everything has gone according to plan, you should now have two folders of the same name – one zipped and one not – on your computer. You can delete the zipped version, if desired.

Now, upload the unzipped folder to the WordPress “themes” directory on your hosting service. Here’s how you install a theme using Bluehost:

1. Go to Bluehost and login to your account. The Control Panel appears.
2. Click Unlimited FTP and wait for the FTP window to appear, as shown below.



3. In the Local File System list, change to the drive and folder on your computer where your theme folder is stored.
4. In the file list for your hosting service, double-click on the public_html folder and then change to the folder that contains your WordPress themes. If you installed WordPress in the root directory, your themes should be in /public_html/wp-content/themes. You should already have a few theme folders inside the themes folder.
5. Go back to the Local File System list and click the theme folder you want to upload to your hosting service, and then click the right arrow that appears between the two lists, as shown below.



6. Wait until the upload is complete. The theme folder you uploaded should now be displayed in the themes folder on your hosting service.

Now that the theme is in place, you’re ready to activate it in WordPress.

Activating Your Theme

From the WordPress Dashboard, you can activate your theme. Here’s how:

1. In your Web browser, type the address of your blog followed by /wp-admin and press Enter. For example, you might type something like www.yourname.com/wp-admin and press Enter. The WordPress login screen should appear, as shown below.



2. Type your username and password in the appropriate boxes and click Log In. The WordPress Dashboard appears.
3. Click Appearance and then Themes.
4. Click the theme you just uploaded. WordPress displays a preview window showing how your blog might look with the new theme. Previews can be deceiving, but they give you a general idea.



5. Click the Activate link in the upper right corner of the preview window. This applies the theme to your blog, which should now have an entirely new look.

The cool thing about themes is that you can always switch back to what you had if you don’t like what you see.

Installing the Thesis Theme

If you’ve been following this series, you know that I’m a big fan of the Thesis theme for WordPress. It costs $87 but it looks great, and it has saved me much more than $87 in time and aggravation. The choice is yours, but if I were you, I’d go with Thesis.

The steps for installing Thesis are almost the same as those for installing any other theme. You download the theme to your computer and then upload it to the /wpcontent/themes folder on your hosting service. Then, you need to take a few additional steps. Here’s what you do if you’re using Bluehost:

1. After uploading the Thesis theme, login to Bluehost and go to the Control Panel.
2. Click the File Manager icon, click Go, and wait for the File Manager to appear.
3. Wind your way to the /wp-content/themes/thesis-15/custom-sample folder, click Rename, and change the folder name custom-sample to just custom as shown below.



4. Change back to the /wp-content/themes/thesis-15/ folder.
5. Select the layout.css file, click Permissions, and change the file’s permissions to 666, as shown below.



6. [optional] If you’d like to give Thesis the ability to auto-crop thumbnail images for you, then go to /wp-content/themes/thesis-15/ click the cache folder, click Permissions, and change the folder’s permissions to 775 as shown below.



7. Inside your WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance,  Themes, and then activate Thesis 1.5.

Tweaking a Standard WordPress Theme

Some themes offer a few ways you can tweak the design without having to edit the files that comprise the theme. For example, in the WordPress Default theme, you can click Appearance and then Header Image and Color to give your blog’s header a unique look.

Some themes support widgets that allow you to add stuff to the sidebars. For example, I use widgets on both JoeKraynak.com/blog and ComputerChimp.com to display cover images for the books I’ve written along with links to recent posts, small advertisements, and a list of categories.

To add or remove widgets, click Appearance and then Widgets, and use the available options. (The figure below shows a few types of available widgets.) I’ll talk more about creating widgets in a future post.

To really take control of your theme, however, you have to edit the various files that comprise the theme. To do this, click Appearance, Editor. The WordPress Editor appears, as shown below, displaying the content of one of the theme’s editable files. On the right is a list of files you can edit.

Most of the changes you’re going to make are to CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) settings that control things like the size, position, and color of text and how images are positioned in relation to text. CSS can be very complicated. I’ll be blogging about that in the future, too.

Tweaking Your Blog Design with Thesis

With the Thesis theme, you can tweak your blog’s design without having to deal with CSS. Instead, Thesis provides its own control panels – Thesis Options and Design Options that allow you to control much of the formatting and layout by selecting your preferences via the control panels.

To access the Thesis control panels, click Appearance and then Thesis Options or Design Options.

Although Thesis lets you tweak the design and layout with its control panels, these control panels do not give you full command over your blog. For more advanced customizations, you’ll need to know how to edit two Thesis files in its “custom” folder – custom.css and custom_functions.php. I’ll show you some examples in a future post.

That’s it for now. In my next post, I’ll introduce you to my favorite WordPress plugins – add-on features that can really make your WordPress blogging easier and more enjoyable. I’ll show you how to install the plugins, activate them, and configure them for your use. See “Make a Website: Essential WordPress Plugins.”

You can take several approaches to creating and managing your own site on the Internet, starting with low-end stuff like creating a free blog on WordPress.com to high-end stuff like hiring a professional designer to set up everything for you. In this series, I lead you down the middle of the road. This series assumes you want:

• Your own domain, like www.yourname.com with an email address like yourfirstname@yourname.com.
• A website or blog on your own, unique domain. (In this series, I show you how to use blogging software to create a combination website/blog.)
• The satisfaction of doing it yourself.

I’ve registered most of my domain names through Bluehost and have been using it as my hosting service for about three years. (A hosting service is where the files that make up your site will ultimately live on the Internet.) With Bluehost, you can…

• Register your own, unique domain name
• Create one or more websites or blogs
• Have up to 2500 email accounts for your domain name – like jack@companyname.com, jill@companyname.com, and kerry@companyname.com
• Create your own message boards
• … and more

To find out more, visit Bluehost, click the Tell Me More button, and then click the Demo Login… button. This logs you into a mock Bluehost Control Panel, were you can take Bluehost for a test drive. A tutorial window should pop up, providing additional details.

Register a Domain Name

Registering a domain name is pretty easy, assuming it’s not already taken, but you should spend some time deciding on a good name. When you’re trying to come up with a catchy name that plays well on the Web, check out “12 Rules for Choosing the Right Domain Name” by Rand Fishkin.

Several sites allow you to check domain name availability for free, including Whois.net, Internic.net, ajaxwhois.com, www.domjax.com, and Bluehost.com. When you find a name you like that’s available, register it. On Bluehost.com, here’s what you do:

• If you don’t have a Bluehost account, go to Bluehost.com, click Domain Check, and follow the onscreen instructions to register your domain and open a Bluehost account.



• If you’re already a Bluehost customer, log in to the Control Panel, scroll down to the Domains area, click Register Domain, and follow the on-screen instructions.

Create an Email Account

One of the first things you’ll want to do on Bluehost is create an email account. You can then access your mail via the Web by going to mail.yourname.com or you can set up your own email program, such as Outlook Express to fetch your mail for you. Setting up a new email account is a snap:

1. Log on to Bluehost, if you’re not already logged on.
2. Go to the Control Panel.
3. Scroll down to the Mail section and click Email Accounts.
4. Type the name you want to use in your email address and select the domain (if you have multiple domains in your account), as shown below.



5. Type the password you want to use in the Password and Password (Again) boxes.
6. Click Create. The new email account is added to your Current Accounts list.

To configure Outlook or Outlook Express for sending and receiving email through the new account, scroll down to the Current Accounts list and click the Configure Mail Client Option. This opens a window that includes links you can click to have Bluehost automatically configure Outlook or Outlook Express. The required settings are also displayed, so you can configure your email client yourself, even if you happen to use something other than Outlook.

Install WordPress

The next thing you’re likely going to want to do on Bluehost is install WordPress – the program you’ll use to create and manage your blog/website.

Bluehost has several website creation and management tools, including Page Wizard Site Builder. People often waste a lot of time with these “Wizards” and wind up with mediocre sites to show for their efforts. WordPress (or better yet WordPress + Thesis) gives you much greater flexibility.

Before you proceed with the installation, consider where you’re going to have the WordPress files installed:

• The root directory: This is probably the best option if your site is going to consist of only one blog, only one website, or a combination blog/website as described in this series. By installing in the root directory, people can pull up your site in their browsers by entering www.yourname.com.
• A subdirectory: This is a great option if you plan on having your blog separate from your website, because it places all your blog files in a separate folder. To get to your site, however, people will need to tack the folder name onto the end of your domain name, as in www.yourname.com/blog. I used this option for FinkShrink.com, where the main website is on FinkShrink.com and the blog is on FinkShrink.com/blog.
• A subdomain: With a subdomain, you can install WordPress into a separate subdirectory (folder) and then create a subdomain, such as blog.yourdomain.com that people can enter in their browsers to go to your blog. (You can easily create a subdomain through the Bluehost Control Panel.)

Advanced: On JoeKraynak.com, I installed my blog in a separate folder and use a “redirect” to steer traffic from JoeKraynak.com to JoeKraynak.com/blog. In other words, if you try to go to JoeKraynak.com, you’ll end up at JoeKraynak.com/blog.

On Bluehost, installing WordPress is a snap with SimpleScripts. Here’s what you do:

1. Log into Bluehost and go to the Control Panel, if you’re not already there.
2. Scroll down to Software / Services and click the WordPress icon.



3. Follow the onscreen instructions to complete the installation.

Once WordPress is installed, you can visit your new blog by entering its address in your Web browser. It doesn’t look like much, but the Internet wasn’t built in a day, either.

To log in to WordPress, type its address in your Web browser followed by wp-login.php or wp-admin and press Enter. Enter your username and password, as shown below, and click Log In.

The WordPress Dashboard appears, which gives you access to everything you need to start posting entries and tweaking your blog layout and appearance.

You can click the New Post button (upper right of the Dashboard) to display the screen below, which provides all the tools you need to compose, format, and publish a blog post.

Next time, I’ll discuss themes – the code that works behind the scenes to control the look and layout of your blog. You can completely revamp the appearance of your blog by changing themes – it’s almost as easy as changing your clothes! See “Make a Website, Changing the Look and Layout with a WordPress Theme.”

Blogging software has become so sophisticated that most people no longer need complicated and expensive website creation and management tools to build and maintain a Web presence. In less than 30 minutes, you can register your own domain name, install the blogging software (also called a blogging platform), make a few tweaks to the design, and start posting content to the Web. You can then spend as much or as little time as you want customizing your blog.

With a blogging platform, posting content to your site is like composing a document in Microsoft Word.

I’ve created several websites and blogs, including JoeKraynak.com, FinkShrink.com, FinkShrink.com/blog, Slampapi.com/blog, and DrRobertWood.com. In the process, I settled on what I believe is the perfect collection of tools for the average Joe or Joanne to build and maintain a Web presence:

• Bluehost – to host my sites (and provide me with my own personal email address)
• WordPress – the blogging platform I use to post content to my site
• Thesis – a WordPress theme that controls the overall layout and appearance of my site (you can choose from over 4 million free themes, but I paid $87 for Thesis, because I couldn’t find anything else that was quite as flexible and powerful)
• Thesis OpenHook – a free WordPress plugin that makes it easier to configure Thesis
• A collection of additional free WordPress plugins to do everything from reducing comment spam to making my site more attractive to search engines like Google

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be posting about each of these tools and showing how to use them to set up a blog that looks and functions like a combination blog and website.

If you blog, you’ve probably heard of WordPress. It’s a blogging platform that makes it easy to post content on the Web. You just type your entry in a form, click the Publish button, and your entry appears on your blog (sort of like a Web site). What you’re reading right now, for example, is a blog post. A theme controls the appearance of everything on the blog and sometimes its functionality. You can change the entire look and layout of your blog simply by installing and activating a new theme. It’s as easy as changing clothes.

Recently I was helping a colleague of mine create a new blog at Slampapi.com/blog, so I needed to go shopping for a template. I asked friends to recommend templates. One said, “That should be easy enough. WordPress has over 4 million of them!” That was exactly my problem. I have trouble picking out a tube of toothpaste at the grocery store. How on earth could I be expected to choose from over 4 million templates!

Further compounding the problem is the fact that WordPress offers no effecient way for browsing through its massive collection. They don’t even sort the themes by category or color scheme. (I’m partial to three-column themes, and we were looking for something in grayscale.) The categories presented in the WordPress Themes directory consist of Most Popular, Newest, and Most Recently Updated. Those were of no use for me. When I did a search for “three-column grayscale” I was presented with a long list of themes that included everything from 1- to 4-column themes. Ugh!

Finally, I used my “Call a friend” option and called upon my blog expert buddy, Mikal Belicove. He recommended the Thesis theme. He told me to watch the 16-Minute Demo Video and then let him know what I thought. I took his advice and watched the video. Wow! The video made the process of customizing the blog as easy as toasting a slice of bread. I was SOLD! I ordered the developer’s edition for $167, downloaded my copy of the theme, installed it, and was ready to roll… or so I thought.

The one thing I wanted to do is replace the blog title at the top with a large graphic. I’d done it before in WordPress without a hitch using a free template. Unfortunately, I could find no similar option in Thesis. What a ripoff, I thought. The one big customization thing I wanted to do, and I couldn’t find a way to do it!

So, I proceeded to do what I usually do when I try and fail at a task – I read the instructions. After some reading and playing with Thesis for a day, I realized that it is a well-designed theme – very powerful and flexible and even simple for most users. It can be more challenging than expected, however, if you need to customize the overall look, layout, or functionality of the template. In such cases, you may have to write scripts or wrestle with some CSS formatting codes, as you would need to do if you were customizing a free theme.

The difference with Thesis is that instead of making changes to the theme files, which are usually packed with a lot of code, you leave those files alone and make changes to two “custom” files – custom.css and custom_functions.php. This prevents users from having to search through a lot of code to find the code they want to modify and from inadvertently messing up the core theme files. In a way, this simplifies customization, but it takes some getting used to.

If you’re thinking of using Thesis, just keep your expectations in check. It comes with a bit of a learning curve, but once you get over the hump, you’ll never want to go back.