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Archive for the ‘Blog Design’ Category

Quite often when people start a WordPress blog they know exacly what they want it to look like.

Maybe they’ve seen someone else’s blog and think that that’s the sort of blog design they want. Yet when they come to find a free WordPress theme, they can’t find anything that really fits the bill. Or, when they’ve downloaded and installed a theme they think they like it doesn’t really behave the way they want.

This can be very frustrating and time-consuming (trust me – I’ve been there!)

Now, this isn’t a problem if you are a gifted designer AND you know the quirks of WordPress inside out AND you have good color sense AND you know how to code php and css and html – you can simply sit down and create your own theme.

But what about the rest of us?

Let me tell you how I designed the theme for this blog.This is a design that I created myself and it’s unique – no other blog in the blogosphere looks quite like this one. It took me a couple of hours of playing around to get it how I wanted but I didn’t have to do any coding or testing or tweaking. All I had to do was click and drag some shapes and colors.

I used Artisteer which is a design package that lets you design your own blog themes. It has numerous options for page layouts, color combinations, fonts, backgrounds, graphic effects – and it has a nice library of photos you can use as header images. Or you can upload and use your own images, if you want.

Artisteer is serious fun. You can design as many blog themes as you like and you can change your mind and edit the ones you’ve already designed. It’s easy and satisfying to create your own themes and you don’t have to know anything technical at all to design something that is exactly what you want.

All Artisteer themes generate correct, validated HTML and CSS that conform to web standards. Oh, and it also designs basic web pages and Joomla and Drupal (whatever they are …)

Check out Artisteer now – and get creative!

WordPress blogs will, by default, display your latest posts on the front page and this is what will show up when someone visits your URL.

But what if you want to have another page displayed as your ‘home’ page? This might be a general description of what your blog is all about, or it might be a hub page giving links to resources in your blog, or it could even be your ‘About’ page.

If you want your WordPress blog to display the same page every time someone visits your URL, all you have to do is change your settings.

First of all you have to write and publish the page that you want displayed.

Then to make this page appear first, click on ‘Settings’, ‘Reading’ and look for the radio button that says ‘Front page displays’. There will be a drop down box and you can select the page that you want displayed.

Then click on ‘Save Changes’ and you’re done!

Changing your WordPress blog’s header image is a great way to personalize it and to make your blog unique to you. So, is there an easy way to do it?

Yes – follow these steps and it should be straightforward.

1. Find out what your blog’s existing header image is called and find out its dimensions. The easiest way to do this is to display your blog in your browser and right-click the header. Depending on your browser, you want to click ‘Properties’ or ‘View background image’ or something similar which will let you see more information about the image. Note the filename of the image and its dimensions.
2. Now you need an image that you want to use instead. Open the image file in PhotoShop or Elements or some other image processing software. Crop and/or resize it to make it the same dimensions as your blog’s header. Then save it somewhere on your computer with the same name, and in the original image format (.jpg, .png, .gif), as the original header.
3. Then you’re going to upload your image to overwrite the one on your blog. Go into your FTP program, log in and navigate to your blog’s WordPress files. To find the header file, drill down to:
   • wp-content
   • themes
   • [your blog's theme]
   • images
4. You should see the image file in the file list there. It would be a good idea to rename this file so that if there is a problem you can rename it back to what it was. Now simply upload your amended image in place of the original header.

Now display your blog (you may need to refresh your browser). If the images displays OK, congratulations!

If the above routine doesn’t work, check that you’ve done everything properly. If there is any problem it probably means that your theme’s author designed the theme in a non-standard format.  The best way to proceed is now to visit the author’s blog (link in the footer) and ask how to change the header. There’s a good chance that someone has already asked the question and your answer may be there.

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