434 CHAPTER 16 CHANGING THE LOOK OF (Web hosting comparison)
434 CHAPTER 16 CHANGING THE LOOK OF YOUR BLOG Note Andrew Chak, in his book Submit Now: Designing Persuasive Websites (New Riders Press, 2002) defined visitors to web sites in three different ways of moving around the site. Wanderers encounter the site with no real purpose in mind, looking for something to catch their attention. Finders are looking for something specific or help to find it, even though they don t know exactly what they want. Learners are looking for some information to learn something new. When visitors come to your site, it needs to communicate in more than text alone. Word- Press doesn t hinder you in your quest to communicate with visitors. It enables you to configure your blog to add images, define an organization, and use a style for each page consistently if the whole site maintains a single theme or idea, or individually if each page has a theme of its own. A simple example is to define each category to have unique colors and images while maintaining a consistent arrangement on each page. In this chapter, I ll show you how to use WordPress themes to have your blog s appearance achieve this communication with your audience. A WordPress theme is like a template. WordPress inserts the posts you write, the comments your readers leave, the links you create, and other information into the page dynamically. Themes consist of a number of PHP files and a style sheet. Before going any further, let me assure you that you do not need to understand the internals of how a theme works or how it s managed by WordPress to use it. Adopting a theme can be as simple as uploading it to your blog and enabling it in the Themes tab of the Presentation page. On the other hand, if you want to start investigating a theme with the intention of learning from it or modifying it, you can do that, too. I will show you how to do that later in this chapter, in the Modifying an Existing Theme section. Selecting an Installed Theme WordPress comes with two built-in themes. The Default theme, based on Michael Heilemann s Kubrick theme, is shown in Figure 16-1. It is a fixed-width layout centered in the browser window. The other built-in theme is the WordPress Classic theme produced by Dave Shea for WordPress 1.2, shown in Figure 16-2. This is a flexible theme that stretches to fill the width of the browser.
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