Hello World! and WordPress Theme Customization

As it seems appropriate for my first post, I will talk a little about the layout of my blog and how it was designed.

At first, I figured, “hey I’ll just quickly make my own theme and use that.”  After reading exactly how much goes into making a totally custom theme for WordPress, I quickly realized I had initially been far too ambitious.  There had to be a solution

Create Your Own Custom WordPress Theme

The first option I explored when I was attempting to customize my WordPress theme was making your own theme.  If you know a little bit of HTML and some CSS, there are a number of demos online that can help you with the framework necessary for a basic WordPress theme.  Even this, however felt like more work then I had time for.  Granted, I would have loved to have spent a whole day making the perfect WordPress theme, however I simply have too many other things going on for this project.

Check out these options for making your own fully customized WordPress theme:

Manually Tweaking

Another method for customizing your WordPress theme is by manually tweaking an existing theme.  To do this, you again need to have a pretty good knowledge of HTML and CSS and be able to edit the code from a current WordPress theme.  All you do is go into the Appearance tab of the admin section of your WordPress blog and select editor.  Here you will find most of the files you want to edit to make your blog look unique!  If you are really savvy with HTML and CSS, you can access the WordPress files through FTP and manually edit them for further customization!  **Be careful** Editing this way can cause problems when updating your blog.  If you automatically update your blog software, you may lose all the custom changes you have made with this method.  Although I have done this on other blogs I have contributed to, I wanted a better way to make my blog look great.

WordPress Theme Generator

The WordPress Theme Generator is another great way to create a custom style for your blog.  It gives you some basic options to edit the layout and style of your blog and then creates the necessary theme files for you to use. The best part about the WordPress Theme Generator is that you can see what you’re changing as you’re changing the colors and layout and design of your theme.  I felt this method lacked the ability to do the amount of customization I had planned, however if you need to create a great looking custom WordPress theme ASAP, this is a great choice.

My Solution: The Customizable WordPress theme Constructor

Finally, after an endless (or more like 5 minute) search through Google, I came upon my solution of choice, Constructor.  Constructor is a WordPress theme that can be installed through the WordPress admin area of your blog.  The reason I decided to use Constructor to create the theme for my WordPress blog is because of the ease of customization.  Additionally, the ability to edit the CSS code from within the WordPress admin area makes it almost too easy to make quick edits to your WordPress theme.

Final Thoughts

Maybe in the future I’ll be able to find the time to make my own fully customized theme for my WordPress blog, however for now, with the variety of high quality alternatives available, I’m going to stick to these options.

What do you think?  Do you have a better solution?  Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts or ideas for WordPress theme customization.