Personalizing Your WordPress Theme & Giving It Your Own Look

This post in the Using WordPress to Run Church Websites series is to demonstrate how free WordPress themes can be personalized and customized to fit your own unique look.

We’ve talked about finding and picking one of the thousands of free WordPress themes … now I just wanted to quickly show you the “potential” of a theme by using my recent theme change here at CCP as a Before and After example.

To me, the key to finding a good theme is picking one that’s fairly simple (not overly complex) that can be twisted, tweak, squeezed, hacked, fine-tuned to be just the kind of “look” you want.

As I talk about tweaking your theme, I can’t help but think of some of the cars and trucks that are fan favorites for customizations, like the Scion or a Honda Accord or those Mitsubishi mini-cars.

Basically, these cars are brought stripped down from the manufacturer with no bells and whistles, then totally “pimped out” with new paint, bumpers, whatever. (You get the picture, right?)

The same can be said for a lot of good, quality themes.

So when I go looking for a theme, I try to find one that is well-built (coded), has a simple layout, and can easily be modified to look the way I want it.

These are the reasons I choose Brian Gardner’s Blue Zinfandel 3-column theme.

Here’s what it looks like “out of the box” or unzipped.

And here’s obviously what it looks like after:

I think you can see the basic structure and layout is all there … it just has a new skin. I hope this shows that even with minor tweaks like putting in a graphical header at the top can go a long, long way to giving your site a personalized flair.

Here are some of the tweaks that I can remember doing:

1. The graphical header, of course.
2. Tweaking the main navigational font sizes and look. I’m still working on making the rollover links have a full black bar behind it. Right now, it’s just the size of the text.
3. The background image that shows the two sidebars in grey. This was the hardest part to decide on from a design standpoint. I toyed and toyed with it … I’m settled though … for now.
4. Some minor tweaks in how categories and author bylines appear. By the way, I’m calling them “topics” instead of categories …
5. I took out a lot of dynamic PHP stuff and made static HTML instead for things like the sidebar. The theory here is that I want to put the least amount of workload on the MySQL database possible so it loads faster. (I’m not a techy, so this may be my ignorance showing here.)
6. Included an email subscription box at the end of each post. (This is the same as the previous version, but still a tweak to the theme.) This has helped my email subscriptions substantially, I think. My thought here is that after someone reads a post they are “convinced” that my email newsletter may be worthy too. Tweak, tweak, tweak … the life of a blogger!

There’s more but you’re beginning to fall asleep … I can tell.