WordPress Help

[MatthewL]

I'm no web designer but have a basic site for a friend on my hosting, I have a theme we are happy with but need to change some of the colours of. I presume you do this in a CSS file (the only web I have ever done was with WYSIWYG editors or some basic HTML).

 

I pretty much know what is going on the site, very basic who we are, what we do, testimonials and contact form. I can add the pages ok but the rest of it it way beyond me.

 

Any help would be appreciated, a point in the right direction would be good.

[Steve21]

depends on the theme, some are built into options within it but otherwise it'd be the css yes

 

Is it basic changes or lots to change? Might be worth doing a screenshot to show what bits (or if you want to have an easy play use developer tools in a browser and highlight the bit you want to change and it'll usually show what line in the css file it links to)

 

Steve

[icemonkey]

As mentioned, sometimes the themes have built in editors which will let you customise it but sometimes you will need to edit the code.

If you're editing the code of an existing theme, I recommend using a Child Theme. When you run a theme update, it replaces the files with a new copy from the developer therefore you would lose any changes you've made to the files.

 

Child theme consists of (at a minimum) style.css and functions.php, to begin with you're essentially just referencing the "parent" theme. You then add your changes to the child theme files. Once you've got your head around it, they are really straight forward.

https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/advanced-topics/child-themes/

 

Example, current paragraph font is Times New Roman in Black but you want it in Verdana and Blue.

You would add the following to your child style.css (leaving the orginal css file untouched)

.p {
font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;
color: blue;
}

[colly72]

If you can't get your head around a child theme, or don't want to go down that route right away, you could always use a CSS plugin. A good round-up of them is here:

 

https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/live-editing-css/

 

Ultimately though, as @icemonkey says, a child theme is the way forward, as not only can you add custom css but also functions/custom code.

 

In my other life, I do freelance Wordpress work, so drop me a pm if you need any help.

[MatthewL]

Thanks for that, it was going to be my next question. I'm going to take a look over the weekend and go from there.