Johnny Saturn

Hi, Folks!

Hope all is well out in internet land!

Last week I wrote about setting up a WordPress/Comicpress website, and some of the plugins that would come in handy.  This week, I’m going to dive into some of the basic approaches to fleshing your site out.  I’m going to assume, for the moment, that you’ve successfully installed your site, you’ve uploaded your comics, and everything is working the way it should.  That’s assuming a lot, I realize, because these things never seem to come off without a hitch or two, but hang in there.

Most of your modifications are going to be done on your WordPress Dashboard under “Design” and then “Theme Editor.”  Within the Theme Editor, you will see a column on the right of files you many access, and on the left each file’s code, and on the bottom an “Update File” button.  Pretty straightforward, really.  I would suggest that before you go modifying these files, copy and past their language into a WordPad file and save it—this way, if you mess the site up, you have the language to paste back in and restore the website.  Do this, or copy the whole file into a safe directory on your hard drive.

The files that you are most likely to access and change from the Theme Files are “Header,” “Stylesheet,” and “Footer.”  The Stylesheet is a CSS file, aka Cascading Style Sheet document, and this is where you can change all the sites colors, fonts, and many elements associated with the site’s appearance.  If anything puts off inexperienced website builders more than CSS, I don’t know what it is.  Luckily, it’s not that hard to learn. 

If you plan on changing your site’s color themes, I suggest you have the colors you want worked out in advance.  Web colors usually are expressed as hexadecimals, and they are preceded in the Stylesheet file by #.  There are many places you may go on the web to determine your color choices and their hexadecimals, such as:

http://www.htmlvalidator.com/htmlval/fontsandcolors.html

http://mediazeal.com/colorthemes.html

http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html

There are many more such online applications and guides to help you choose your colors.

Changing the colors of pages and fonts on your site is as simple as going to the existing choices in your Stylesheet and replacing your hex values for the existing one, then hitting “Update File.”  Open your site in another screen, and reload it often to see the results of your color changes.  You can also change many of your site’s design elements, or proportions, from the Stylesheet file, but I’m leaving that to a future column.

Another useful tool to use in setting up your site is Widgets.  While in the Design, go to Widgets, and there you will see an assortment of options, including Pages, Links, Meta, Recent Posts, etc.  I use Archive Dropdown, Bookmark Comic, and Text Widgets.  On the left side of the screen, next to each widget, is an “Add” button.  Hit that, and the Widget reappears on the right side of the screen.  Before you do anything with said Widget, press “Save Changes.”  You can save multiple Text widgets.

The Text Widgets are particularly useful, because you can use these to install Project Wonderful ads, Amazon.com ads, Google ads, Web Rings, and the like.  Copy your ad language, past it into one of the text boxes under Widgets, press the “Change” button at the bottom of the opened Widget, and the ad should then appear on your site.

Next week I’ll cover Headers and Footers.  See you then!  Scott.