Customizing a Wordpress theme the easy way

Coding and designing is not my strong point, but these past few weeks I have learned a lot and am proud to say that I pulled some CSS code right out of my butt and it actually worked! It’s great to be able to have an idea of what you want a web page to do and know what code to write to make it do exactly that.

One of the tools I’ve been using will have to take most of that credit – WampServer. I’m not exactly sure what took me so long to download this, but I’m almost sick to my stomach when I think about how much time I’ve wasted before installing it.

This handy dandy little program is perfect for anyone who customizes Wordpress themes. I’m sure there are lots of other methods but this one works perfectly for me, and it’s allowed me to learn CSS much more quickly than before. Did I mention that WampServer is free?

So what does WampServer do?

Let’s say you want to spruce up your Wordpress theme a little bit, or put up a brand new theme, but you don’t want all your visitors to see any changes (or mistakes) you’ve made until you’re finished. Installing WampServer allows you to use your computer like a server so you can install Wordpress locally. You can make all the changes you want and nobody will ever see. When you’re done, just copy the code and paste over your existing Wordpress files on your regular server.

This is also a great way to mess around with some code to see what does what. Delete some code, save the file, refresh your page, and see what happened. Now you know what that chunk of CSS you just deleted was for. If it was something slightly important, just overwrite the file with the original one you’ve smartly kept on backup.

After years of messing around with CSS, this is hands down the best method I’ve used to figure out just what the hell I’m doing – and in such a short amount of time. Not to mention the fact that I can customize a Wordpress theme in a fraction of the time it used to take me. There’s gold in that thar WampServer.

RT @cassiegermsheid: "Customizing a Wordpress theme the easy way"