OK, in order to work out how WordPress sites are put together, I’m going to have to put on my Graphic Design Geek hat. (Yes I have one of those. It’s a black beret, by the way.)
I’m intending to blog about the changes I’m making as I go along. There are two possible outcomes here :
1. This may serve as a useful resource for anyone else attempting to customise their own blog.
or
2. This will be a catalogue of disasters, showing how to mess things up royally.
Obviously, I hope it’s not going to be (2) – but if by any chance you happen to be reading this and can spot disaster looming – please feel free to comment and point me back in the right direction!
As it stands, having spent about 2 minutes looking at the Design > Theme Editor tab I’m thinking this is the way to go. I’ll make a complete copy of the themes/default directory on my hard drive just in case I mess anything up. If I do, I should be able to selectively replace either the messed up style sheet, image, or (god forbid) php file.
By the way, I’ve recently been working on optimising my main website. Currently I’ve only replaced a couple of pages, but I have managed to create a pretty well-formed HTML template, and a style sheet that seems to render it identically on most browsers (according to the excellent Browsershots.org). So I’m hoping that with a bit of sly CSS cut’n’pasting, I should be able to impose my style on the default WordPress template – which also uses a basic two-column layout like my main site. Anyway, here goes. I think maybe the first thing to do is to change pixel dimensions only, and leave fonts, colors and images until later.
I’ve a good few years’ experience hand-coding HTML and CSS. I’ve got a pukka copy of the Adobe CS3 suite. I’ve got the O’Reilly book ‘Learning PHP & MySQL’ (I knew it might come in handy one day). I’ve got ‘The Convincer’ by Nick Lowe on repeat.
What could possibly go wrong?