Customizing wordpress themes for your blog is a very important step in building your online brand. By using a custom wordpress theme for your blog, you will not only make your blog look unique in this flooded world wide web, but also take a step to build your own brand. But most of the new bloggers use a ready made wordpress theme for their blogs, because they don’t know how to customize wordpress theme for their blog. But customizing wordpress themes is very easy, even if you don’t have much knowledge about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). In this article, I will give you some ideas about customizing your current wordpress theme to a new and different one, as well help you implement those ideas in your theme. So, lets start changing your boring old theme into a brand new and unique theme, free and easily.

Starting with the Theme Header

The header of your blog is one of the most important areas you should immediately focus on, because it is the header that your visitors will see first, and if its a nice and sleek header, it will create good impression on your viewers. If your blog header is not a good one, it may create a negative impression on your readers, because after all, design matters.

Thin Header or Large Header ?

The question may arise in your mind that what type of header should you choose, a thin and sleek header or a large and artistic one? Well, the answer to that question is different according to your needs.

If you are having a personal or design related blogs then you can choose to have large and heavy designed header to grab the attention of your viewers. And since you are having a design related blog, making a large and good header also shows off your work, and what you are capable of doing. For example, this blog Designora has made a pretty impressive and large header,

But, if you are having a news or information related blog, like daPazze or Mashable, then you should always choose to have a thin, clean and sleek header, because your main goal is to provide good information, not to show off a well designed header. As you can see both daPazze and Mashable has sleek and thin headers,

How to Customize the Header of Your Blog

If you want to have a full width header for your blog, then you need to modify your header CSS of your blog, if it isn’t a full width header already. For example as you can see, the daPazze header, since it covers the whole screen area, its a full width header.

You can go to the WordPress Themes Editor, which is located at Appearance-> Editor, and change the header width in the CSS to 100%. For example,

#header {

width: 100%;

height: 50px;

}

If you want to do something like a large designer type header for your blog, then you can design a good header in photoshop, upload it to your server and use it as the background of your header. For example,

#header {

width: 100%;

height: 50px;

background-image: url(‘header.jpg’);

}

But if you want to have a nice sleek header like daPazze and Mashable, then you need to design your header in photoshop, keep it less in height, about 50px or 75px would be nice and after creating your header, slice a part of it, lets say about 1px wide, and save it as an image. Then do the same for this one, and place the code as written above.

This is a method of wordpress themes customization that will surely give your wordpress theme a new and better look, if you are not already having one.

Doing Some Content Area Designing

The content area includes your post heading, its content, and comments. A dull looking content area is not so much preferable by readers, whereas a nicely designed content area, well design here means some text effects, etc, is much more preferable by readers, as they content is more appealing and easy to read. For example daPazze has its content area designed with some cool CSS effects, so that readers find the post easy to read.

As you can see above, the daPazze Post area looks clean with some CSS stylings. Here, mainly CSS Text Shadow effect, increase of font size and better looking horizontal lines are used. You can also use these effects in your blog post area to make it more appealing to your readers and increase readability.

CSS Text Shadow Effect

CSS Text Shadow effect is a great and unique way to spice up your Post heading (mainly h1 headings) and headings inside your posts (mainly h2 headings), by adding a thin text shadow to that headings with a colour that matches your style and looks good. Choosing a light colour for text and a dark colour for shadow is a good combination for your headers. In case you don’t know how to customize wordpress theme to have these text shadow effects, I have written a detailed tutorial on how to add text shadow to your headings, you can go through it for customizing wordpress theme for your blog.

MUST READ : CSS Tips and Tricks to Enhance Your Blog

Increasing Text Size

Increasing the text size is another great way to improve post readability. By increasing the text size, you are not only making your blog posts become more prominent and attractive, but also improving your reader’s experience while reading through your posts.

Choosing a good font size is really necessary for making your posts attractive. Don’t choose a very large size, and don’t choose a very small size either, choose a medium sized font like 13px-15px. Choosing a very large size will make your posts look dirty, while choosing a very small size will result in minute writings, which your readers might not like.

For adjusting your text size, you can include the following code within your body section of your theme CSS alongwith other codes that are present in the body section,

font: 14px Arial;

For example,

body { 

background: #666;

font: 14px Arial;

}

Customizing the Sidebar

Customizing your blog sidebar is no big deal with wordpress, as you can easily drag and drop widgets to your sidebar according to your blog theme. Customizing your blog sidebar is a important part of wordpress themes customization, as it has a good impact on the readers, and stays on all posts and pages.

Tips to Remember When Customizing the Sidebar

Some tips to remember when customizing your blog sidebar, so that you make it attractive and good while ensuring good performance from it too. For example you can see daPazze’s sidebar, its loaded with useful widgets, while making sure that they do not slow down daPazze.

So, here’s a check list that you should follow in order to have a good sidebar for your blog,

• Create a Subscription Box – Create a box where your users will like your Facebook Page, or follow you on Twitter, or Subscribe to your Posts via Feeds and Email. An example of it you can see at daPazze as the PazzeBox, which lets you do all the things in one place and put together in a stylish way. You can design your box in Photoshop and form a box using CSS. Just make a div in your CSS file with the name of your box, put the CSS, and use it in the sidebar using the Text Widget available in WordPress.
• Use Popular Posts Widgets – Use a Popular Posts widget in your blog sidebar to increase pageviews and user engagement on your blog. If you blog theme has already got a ready made popular posts widgets for sidebar, then just drag it to your sidebar and configure it to show the right number of posts. If you don’t have it along with your theme, then you can use other widgets like Disqus Comment widgets, which allows you to show popular posts on basis on number of comments made. You can have a look at the list of 5 Popular Posts Plugins for WordPress in this blog.
• Don’t Fill Up your Sidebar with Ads – If you are having ads in your blog sidebar such as 125px X 125px Ads, then make sure you don’t fill up your sidebar using those ads. Arrange those ads  in a single widget and place it in your sidebar.
• Use Light Widgets – Don’t make your sidebar very heavy by using widgets that fetch javascript from other sites. Use less of those widgets and use light widgets. For more information about this topic see point number 5 in this article for speeding up your wordpress blog.

More Tips on How to Customize WordPress Theme for Your Blog

I am ending this article by providing you some extra tips on how to customize wordpress theme for your blog. For wordpress themes customization you need to have a creative mind, so before you start making changes, start making a plan about what changes you will make in your blog, experiment with them on your blog, see if its working and looking great or not. If its not fitting your blog then think of a new design, or modify it. Remember you can always run your mind freely and try out every design that comes to your mind, because of them will surely give your blog a brand new look.

Customizing wordpress themes is not a very difficult job if you have read this article in detail, but if you are having any type of problem on how to customize wordpress theme for your blog, then feel free to ask us using the comment section below, and we will reply with your answer on wordpress themes customization as soon as possible.

Featured Image Source : balajiwebworld