4 Easy Steps to Edit Your WordPress Theme

Change is inevitable and at some point you’ll want to make changes beyond your blog theme SEO tweaks . You might want to change the width of a column, the size of a font, a color, or a graphic here and there, but editing WordPress themes can be like working in the dark. WordPress creates pages on-the-fly as a browser requests them; there are no HTML files for a particular page, they’re just pieces of code and text stored in a database on your server.

The code for your blog pages is filed through your theme’s stylesheet before it is viewed. If you want to change a font, a color, or another element of the display, you must edit your stylesheet. But with a WordPress blog you can’t see what your stylesheet edits have done until you pull the site up in a browser. When the pages are generated on the fly, editing your stylesheet can mean a continuous loop of editing the stylesheet, saving the changes, then bringing up the actual live page from the internet. It usually means you had better have a dummy site to work on, or your readers could be viewing your changes before you’ve had a chance to perfect them.

Firefox can simplify this process thanks to the Web Developer plugin. It can change the way you go about editing web pages, blog themes, and other site templates. The plugin is great for editing existing pages, but you could use it to build one from scratch as well.

Working With the Web Developer Plugin

1. Install Firefox and add the Web Developer plugin.
2. Open your new browser and bring up the page you wish to edit. Click “file” then “save page as” (or just use, control + S). Save the page in a new folder, naming it something like “test.html”.
3. Open this new page in Firefox, and in the Web Developer toolbar click “CSS” then “edit CSS” (or use, control + shift + E). A window will appear where you can edit the stylesheet for your page.
4. When you have your stylesheet the way you want it, simply paste the new version over your theme’s old stylesheet and save.

Remember, it doesn’t matter how much you may have edited the theme, either its stylesheet or the actual theme files, unless you’re using the default Kubrick theme you are expected to keep the designer’s backlink intact. No matter how much you edit your theme, you can’t take designer credits; you have used the original designer’s foundation. However, you could credit yourself with something like “theme adapted by” (your name).

One great thing about editing your WordPress theme with the Firefox Web Developer plugin is you can see the results of your edits as you enter them. In the past you had to do blind edits of your stylesheet. This plugin not only saves all the time it would have taken to save each change and review it in a separate browser, but until you’re ready your changes won’t go live.