Your custom theme
wordpress 3 CommentsJust got the following question…
Hi Craig, I was trying to find a wordpress theme for Life Enrichment/ Spiritual Growth, but can’t find one to my liking. My webmaster wants to charge me $225.00 (1.5 hrs@ $150) to customize the one you have on religion. Is there a less expensive way to customize a template with ‘Life Enrichment’ and my picture in the heading?
So let’s chat about themes today.
If I have a blog idea that I really like and I’m going to stick to building it, I’ll just pay
someone to do the images like what you see here on this blog.
If you have more time than money, you may want to customize your theme.
Let’s just talk about changing your header image for now.
Here’s what you do:
1. Find a wordpress theme you like.
This means finding a theme that has the structure you like; right or left sidebar, etc…
(Colors, images, font size can all be changed easily.)
2. Make sure that theme is widget ready.
Some themes are old and not widget ready. These themes do not communicate well with new wordpress installations.
3. Make sure the theme does not have more than one out going link in the footer
and it does not go to any nonsense sites.
Recently, many people understand the power of back links using themes as the vehicle. Making nice themes,putting back links in the footer and giving them away is a great way to get back links.
But some of these people are putting links into the footer to gambling sites, or other sites that may not help your link reputation. Yes, the sites you link to can hurt you in Google.
My hard and fast rule is one back link in the footer and it goes to a theme site or blog related service site. If the link has nothing to do with my niche or blogs, I will not use the theme.
Go ahead now and install the theme.
Right click on the header image and select “view image” which now you should just be looking at the header image.
Drag that image to your desk top. It should be called header.jpg or header.gif Whatever it’s called, you’ll need to keep that name and file extension the same for the future image you create.
Go to istock.com and find an image you want to use in your header. Making sure to buy a big size one for room to play with.
Most people do not have photoshop as their image changing program. If this is you, get a copy of http://www.gimp.org/
Open up your image program, use that to open up your header image file on your desk top. Also, open up your istock photo and re size it to fit your header image.
Save changes and upload the image to your theme’s image folder.
If this is your first time, you’ll use up a lot of time because it’s a new skill but after the dust clears, you’ll be able to do it real fast in the future. Not sure this is the best path for you unless you’ll be doing this often.
If this all is just a waste of time, farm it out to someone that is real good and fast at it. It’s worth every penny if you have the money.
Craig,
That’s exactly what I did to the header on my blog. “Gimp” is really good and it’s Free! A little bit of a learning curve, but once you do it…
Hey Craig, I don’t know what it is about this post, but you explained a very technical task in such a way that even I could understand it! I’m definitely going to experiment with this GREAT tip. Thanks Very Much!
P.S. I would just love to get one of your themes built for me, and when I have the $$ I will. But until then this post gave me some answers that I had in my own mind that wasn’t even asked here…yet. I’m babbling….ok, bye.
Thanks!
Gary.
Man I totally should have checked out this post this past weekend when I was knee-deep in trying to figure out how to change my header in my blogs.
Thankfully one of the themes I downloaded mentioned how to do it and I kinda stumbled my way through an image editor that I have on my computer (came with it.)
Here I thought that you could only change the headers in themes where they actually said “You can change this header.”
Craig…I love your site here. It’s super useful.
Thanks!
Carey