WordPress 24-Hour Trainer, 3rd Edition

Lesson 29Advanced Design Customization

Depending on the theme you use, the sophistication of built-in design customization can vary greatly. Even a powerful design interface has its limits. The ultimate control over design lies with more advanced techniques, and that's what this lesson is all about. This lesson deals with cascading style sheets (CSS). Although they're not difficult to use, they do require precision, which is a nice way of saying that you can easily mess things up simply by leaving out a bracket or misspelling a word.

If you find that intimidating, then calling on the services of a professional for those kinds of changes makes a lot of sense. But what you'll learn in this lesson is that the changes are not that difficult for a professional, so shouldn't cost too much.

The basic idea behind advanced theme customization is that you're going to override the theme's styling, and there are two ways of doing that:

• Adding custom CSS at some point after the theme CSS has loaded
• Making a Child theme that uses the original theme as its Parent

Both enable you to add your own CSS, but the Child theme method opens up the possibility of modifying or adding theme files as well.

Using Custom CSS

Many themes, even ones with sophisticated design interfaces, have a method of adding your own custom CSS. Whether it's a box in the Customize menu (Figure 29.1 A), a Custom CSS plugin screen (Figure 29.1 B), or a theme's custom CSS option box (Figure 29.1 C), you can write CSS that ...