New Year- Create a New Look for your Blog?

Now that the mad shopping rush is behind most people, it is time to look towards the end of the year and the beginning of a new year. This seems to be the time for reflecting on the old and resolutions and hopes for the new year. Maybe a fresh start for some…

To give it a blogger twist, maybe it is time for a fresh new look for your blog look?

I have been designing website for over ten year. Writing html, using Dreamweaver, designing in Photoshop… until WordPress and its themes came around. Changing the look of a website takes merely seconds instead of hours and hours of work.

How simple can it get? There are literally hundreds of thousands of free themes available. Yours for the choosing. If you are hosting your own blog, meaning your are not hosting with wordpress.com or blogger.com, for example, than you simply download the file, unzip and upload to the wp-content/themes/ folder and voila the theme will show up when you click on Presentations in your Dashboard.

These themes are designed by people like you and me, who are having fun playing around with colors, php, widgets. There are some good themes, some not so good ones and some really badly designed themes out there. Some have features, like widgets, and some have faulty code design. It might take you four or five themes to download and install to find the one you are happy with.

The part that I have the most fun with is customizing a theme. I look for banners and/or other images that I can exchange for my own. The current images of the witch and the globes were not originally in the theme that I downloaded.

Original Theme:

Langwitches Modification Theme:

Just right click on the image you want to replace and choose "View background image". I then note the path of the URL where the image is stored and its file name.

This will help me what to name my new file and where to upload it to via FTP.

Once I have the file path, I right click the image and choose "Save Image As". I then open up the file in my image editor (ex. Adobe Photoshop, Gimp, Fireworks, etc). Now I have an image open with the exact file size that I need to replace the original without messing up the layout of the page. I then just add a new layer with my design over it and save it under the same file name. In the example above "adam.jpg". I do this so, I don’t have to dig deeper into the theme code and change the file name in every spot where the theme is looking for that adam.jpg image.

Once you upload the new image and refresh your browser, it will display you new banner or images.

Here are some website with free WordPress themes for you to choose from and customize:

• Theme viewer
• Blog Oh Blog
  
• Sadish’s Word Press Themes
• Free WordPress Themes – Kate�s Theme Viewer
• 83 Beautiful WordPress Themes You (Probably) Haven�t Seen

If you are sporting a new Blog Theme for the new year, let me know about it by posting a link to your blog in a comment. I always enjoy taking a peek a new looks.

Which reminds me, that I probably need to/want to give langwitches a new new look or at list some fresh images too. Check back in a few days…