If you don’t like your blog’s theme, change it!

I know what you’re going to say: ‘There aren’t any good themes to choose from.’ Well, that’s where you’re wrong. Because here’s an amazing fact:

You only ever need one theme. By making a few simple alterations to that theme, you can create anything you want.

Yes, it’s true, and I can prove it to you. Just go over to CSS Zen Garden. They have a gallery full of excellent themes and they are all created from exactly the same HTML template. Only the styles have been changed.

So, there’s no need to worry about Blogsome’s dearth of themes. Now you can create your own. Here’s how to do it:

1. Pick a Blogsome theme that is similar to what you want. For example, if you want a sidebar on the right hand side, don’t pick a theme with a left hand sidebar
2. Tweak and change as much as you like.

Who knows? By custom building your own theme in this way, you might even become an excellent HTML coder, a CSS wizard, or a brilliant theme designer.

A few words of warning, though. Be careful which theme you use as your starting point. The only theme I’ve ever had any problems with was one called ‘dots2′. In my opinion, you need a bit of expertise before you try and alter that one. ‘Mars spirit’ is a nice theme, too, but I think it has a few too many graphics to make it easy to customise.

Personally, I’d start with one of the ‘Viewfinder’ themes, or ‘Green track’ or maybe ‘Minimaplus’. Start by changing the header image; experiment with different typefaces. And most importantly:

Switch off the WYSI-Wordpress WYSIWYG editor in your Plugins. If you want to learn CSS properly, stop using <font> tags in your blog posts. The right place to change the font colours on your blog is in your style sheet.

Blogsome might only have a few basic themes to offer but don’t let that bother you. Just learn a bit about HTML and CSS coding, and you’ll find there’s a lot more you can do with Blogsome themes than you could possibly imagine.

1. On your Dashboard, go to Manage > Pages and click the button that says ‘Create new page’. (If you have already created a Site Map but it is not working, select ‘Edit’.)
2. In the box marked ‘Page Title’, type ‘Site Map’.
3. Leave the box marked ‘Page Content’ blank. This is important.
4. If you already had something written in the ‘Page Content’ area, erase it. Then go to Manage > Hacks and click ‘Clear cache’.
5. Return to Dashboard and go to Manage > Files. Select the file called ‘index.html’.
6. In your ‘index.html’ file, find the main content div.
7. Find the bit that says {$content) and put the following piece of code immediately after it.

   
{if $smarty.server.REQUEST_URI == '/sitemap/'}
<h2>Site map</h2
<ul>{wp_list_pages}</ul>
<h2>Categories</h2>
<ul>{list_cats optionall='1' all='All' sort_column='name' optioncount='0' children='0'}</ul>
<h2>Posts</h2>
<ul>{get_archives type='postbypost' limit='' format='html'}</ul>
{/if}


8. Click ‘update template’.
9. View your Site Map, which should now be working fine.

Trouble is, after the party, people often forget about the ‘loose ends’, and loads of their old out-of-date web sites are left online forever.

If you know that your site is going to be needed only for a limited period, and you don’t want to have to remember to take the site down afterwards, you really should use this meta tag:

<meta name=”googlebot” content=”unavailable_after: 31-Jul-2008 12:00:00 GMT” />

Obviously, change the date and time to your own requirements.

{if $smarty.server.REQUEST_URI == '/'}
Front Page Content
{else}
{$content}
{/if}

Where it says ‘Front Page Content’, place whatever you want to have as your static front page. (This could be a summary of what your site or blog is about.) Use regular HTML code for this part.

You will also need to put a link to your archives, so that your readers can find all your other posts.

Update: See a demo of this method at http://blogstuff.blogsome.com/