Clarity Strategic^TM

Below is a very rough diagram of a Wordpress blog, to show you what goes into it. Your blog is based on a theme, which defines both its layout and its appearance. There are many skilled designers out there who can create a theme for you from "scratch," but every Wordpress theme - even one custom-made for your site - is composed of common elements written in PHP. This diagram shows a few of those common elements: those which are seen in almost every Wordpress blog.

This description is going to be REALLY brief. If you want to know more, others have written more, starting with Wordpress itself.

For starters, you should know (if nobody's told you) that a blog HOSTED by Wordpress is something different. You can have one of those hosted for free. But you are very limited in terms of what custom design effects you can have. Perhaps the most limiting thing is that you can't load up just any old embedded video or script you want. Wordpress will strip them out. Only links and images for you. And there are fewer themes to choose from. But Wordpress-hosted blogs, that's not what we're talking about here.

A "standard" Wordpress blog you must have HOSTED, so we'll assume you've taken care of that.

In the diagram, you see a layout of major components seen in nearly every Wordpress blog. Components shown on the page itself, and in all small letters, will be associated with a PHP file that can be edited (e.g. header.php, etc.) There is also a stylesheet, style.css, that you can edit to control colors, font sizes, margins, text decorations, etc.

The text in ALL CAPS (CONTENT) shows where the text of your Web site goes. Generally, index.php contains your home page, which by default is a blog; single.php contains a single blog post; and page.php contains a page from your site not associated with the blog (e.g. "about," if you have one of those).

Here is a list of the principal actions the Web designer takes to modify an existing Wordpress theme and customize it for your site:

• Your choice of font styles and colors. This is time-consuming for the designer, because each theme has fonts at different positions in the theme, and most use several colors which must be modified for YOUR site. So if you're having one of these sites made for you, work closely with the designer to make sure you get the text looking the way you want, or the design will take longer.
• Images to serve as backgrounds, especially in the header and footer.
• Links that you want to include in the sidebar. Wordpress includes a "blogroll" in each theme, but with all due respect, I don't know anyone who wants to use it. LOL
• How much blog text you want to appear on the home page. Or even if you want the home page to BE a blog.
• Some themes come with a footer that has been coded into base-64 characters. For the designer that's a pain, because that says the folks who created the theme don't want that footer modified. They don't want to take the chance that they won't get credit for their work, because someone came along and tweaked it. I feel their pain, but too many of them also include sponsored links (e.g. for casinos), and my own customers don't want that. I give the theme designer credit, but I decode from base 64 and get rid of sponsored links. That takes a little time.
• Images that you want to appear on every page of your site, and images that you want to appear on SOME pages.
• Social networking connections, such as Facebook Like buttons and so forth; and social bookmarking links, for Digg, Alltop, and so on.

Work with your designer on all of this and you can have a basic Wordpress site within a couple days. Some customers need more, however - slideshows, calendars, and the like. Wordpress has "widgets" available to give you those features, and your designer must choose among them to find the ones you'll like best, then must tweak and test them. Look to add maybe another day to the process if you need a few such widgets.

I promised this would be brief. I hope it's also helpful. And, of course, this is a service Clarity Strategic provides. :-)