by Moe Zilla

Created on: July 25, 2010

If you're using Wordpress to publish your blog, there's several easy ways you can customize the theme's code. Some of them are as easy as clicking on a few buttons - which is one of the advantages of being part of the Wordpress community. Many talented designers work to provide themes, widgets, and lots of other easy ways that you can get creative with the appearance of your blog or web site. But remember: the choices that are available to you will depend on which kind of Wordpress blog you're running.

For example, Wordpress provides an easy way to open a window which displays all the raw code of your theme. (Look for "Themes" under the "Appearance" menu on the left, and then select the editing option.) But if your Wordpress blog is also hosted by Wordpress (at Wordpress.com), that's as far as you can go.  "You can edit your CSS and preview the changes for free," they'll explain helpfully in a note, but "If you would like the ability to save your changes and make your design visible to the public, please purchase the Custom CSS Upgrade." (This will cost $14.97 per year, according to one of Wordpress's support documents... )

If you're hosting your own copy of Wordpress, then you can actually edit the CSS code directly through the Wordpress interface, clicking the "save" button to automatically implement your changes. (Just remember to turn off any caching plug-ins which might stop you from seeing the difference!) There's lots of tricks you can perform if you know a little bit about CSS. And even if you're a beginner, the PHP code that was used to write the CSS files is surprisingly easy to master.

I was impressed by the examples in this blog's list of The Top 10 Ways to Tweak Your Wordpress Themes. (They tell you how to add an automatic sign-off statement to the end of every blog post, or even create if-then statements to handle how your page is displayed.) But if you don't want to mess around with the CSS at all, there's several other tricks that will let you tweak your Wordpress theme automatically.

For example, the "Links" menu (at the left side of the main interface) will let you add or subtract links to the Blogroll that appears in yoru theme. This is a way of giving a shout-out to any blogs that you want your readers to know about - and the blogs you choose may also tell your readers something about you. If you're just starting out with Wordpress, the most important step is to familiarize yourself with all the menus that are available to you.

After that, you'll be ready to learn the basics of PHP. And then you can give your Wordpress theme any kind of tweak that you want!

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