WordPress® 24-Hour Trainer, Second Edition

29

Basic Customization of Your Design

For a long time, the default theme with WordPress didn't change much, until version 3.0 and the introduction of the Twenty Ten default theme. It's not only quite a nice theme for almost any type of personal or small-business website, but it was made to be customized fairly easily.

In this lesson, I show you how to use the built-in tools of Twenty Ten, as well as some simple changes you can make with style sheets to get the look you want. There isn't room here to go into a lot of detail or develop the skills necessary to make major changes, but there's a lot you can do with even a little bit of knowledge.

In this lesson, you'll be making use of the child theme I showed you how to make in Lesson 28. If you've skipped that lesson altogether or if you didn't actually make the child theme, you'll need to go back and do that now.

Trust me, it's easy and it will save a lot of heartache because if you make any changes to the default Twenty Ten theme files, they'll get overwritten in the next update of WordPress and all your hard work will be lost.

CUSTOMIZING THE HEADER IMAGE

One of the best things about the Twenty Ten theme is the flexibility of its header image area. The most obvious fact when you click Appearance Header is that you can easily upload ...