Question: “I have installed a new theme for my WordPress blog. I need to make a lot of changes to the sidebar menu and other areas, to make it look how I want. Is this hard? How do I customize my WordPress theme without breaking the whole thing?”
One of the benefits of using WordPress is the flexibility it provides. The coding that controls the design is broken up into segments. This means you can easily adjust certain aspects of the blog, such as the sidebar or footer, without affecting other areas. You can also make certain changes to the main-page template that won’t affect the individual blog posts, and vice-versa. Pretty handy. Because of this segmentation, you can customize a WordPress theme more so than a Blogger template (another popular blogging program).
Of course, it helps to understand HTML and PHP coding. Your WordPress theme is mainly built around these two types of web code. So if you want to customize some aspect of the theme, you’ll need to be familiar with HTML /XHTML and PHP. Are you familiar with these things? If so, you simply need to find your way to the “Editor” section of your control panel, and edit the appropriate file for the area in question (header, footer, sidebar, etc.). If you’re not familiar with HTML or PHP, you’ll probably need to get help from someone who is. It really depends on what you’re trying to customize, within the theme.
The Parts of a WordPress Theme
See the image to the right, down below? This is a snapshot I took of the theme files within the WordPress interface. These are the files you would need to change in order to customize the appearance of your blog. To reach them, you would simply log in to your WordPress program and then select “Appearance” >> “Editor” from the left-hand menu. After that, you’ll see something similar to the image below.
The types and names of files that show up will vary, depending on the WordPress blog theme you are using. Some themes use a basic structure, and therefore don’t require many template files. Others are more complex, and require more files to support that complexity.
In the image to the right, you’re seeing the following items:
- 404 Template — You probably know this better as “Page Not Found.” If somebody searches for a page on my blog that does not exist (or has been deleted), they will see my 404 page. I can change the message they see by customizing this part of my WordPress theme.
- Comments – This one is self-explanatory. It controls the look and feel of the comments section of the blog.
- Footer and Header — These are also pretty straightforward. This is the coding that makes up the top and bottom of your site.
- Main Index — Any changes you make here will only apply to the main / home page. In most cases, at least.
- Page Template — This controls the appearance and structure of your pages.
- Sidebar — This is the area you were asking about. If you want to customize the sidebar of your WordPress theme, you would do it through this file.
- Single Post — This controls the actual posts / entries of your blog.
- Stylesheet – Here’s another important file. If you want to customize the appearance of common elements (like the fonts, colors and overall layout), you would need adjust your stylesheet.
Before You Customize Anything…
You should always save a copy of each file before changing it. That way, you can always put the original code back in place if you “break” something. I can’t stress this enough. Save the original first, and then make changes to it. You can do this in one of two ways. You can copy the code from the file in question, and then paste it into a text file. Or you can use an FTP tool to download the file in question from your hosting account, and save it on your computer. Either way, you need to have a backup before you try to customize a WordPresss blog with the theme editor.
I would also recommend making one change at a time, and then viewing the blog to see how it affected the design. It’s a lot easier to undo a single mistake than a dozen of them. This is also a good way to become more familiar with the inner workings of your blogging program and design files.
This article answers the question: How do I customize my WordPress theme design? If you found this article helpful, be sure to bookmark this site for future reference. There are many more blogging tips coming soon.
