At some point you may decide to take the leap from a pre-packaged online blogging platform such as Blogger or Wordpress.com and set up your own Wordpress installation. It may seem like a crazy notion but if you choose the right host they will do most of the work for you. Also these days the very nice people at Wordpress have made the installation a fairly painless experience with excellent software and tutorials.
Then of course you need to install a new theme. There are thousands available - wordpress.org/extend is a good place to start. Then you will need to use an ftp client such as Filezilla (free, open-source and excellent) to upload your new theme (this will go into the following directory www.your_blog.com/wp-content/themes). Then activate from your Wordpress dashboard by going to dashboard>design>themes then click on the theme you’ve uploaded.
At some point you may wish to start to edit your theme - changing fonts, colour schemes or even graphics. This can be done straight from Wordpress by going to dashboard>design>theme editor and directly editing the stylesheet. This all works very well but the possibility of making a mistake is high and this will ‘go live’ as soon as you hit update.
The best way to deal with this is local editing on your computer. Open your themes files in your FTP client and drag the stylesheet and images folder into a new folder on your desktop. Then save a page from your blog as html only in the same folder - open that page in a text editor such as wordpad and change the address of the stylesheet from a URL (probably something like <link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”http://your_blog.co/wp-content/themes/your_theme/style.css” /> to a local address such as <link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”style.css” />.
This will then mean you can open your saved page in a browser and edit the style.css without touching your real website.
If you know nothing about CSS (cascading style sheets) then please ignore this article and go straight to the pub, drink several large fruity cocktails and talk rubbish to man named Nigel.
3 Comments
I’ve gotten back into using Xampp just for that, I’d never tried your workaround.
Best recommendation for generating WP themes that’s open source or low cost, rather than having to hack and learn through code.
Nigeypoo curls his pinky when sipping his beer, I hear.
“Best recommendation…” was meant as a question based on your experience. See what happens when you bring up that name. I’ll send you my therapist bill next month.
The only sensible options are rooting around for a customisable theme (K2 is a good start but there are plenty of others) where you can change headers, sidebar configurations etc direct from the dashboard or find a theme that is the right layout for you and just change the graphics files (via ftp) making sure you rename them the same as the originals.
Apart from that you really have to dive into the code and get your hands dirty.
I stopped apologising for Nigeypoos years ago even though I am truly sorry…