Archive for Themes

Video Tutorial: Add your custom CSS styles to your stylesheet

Learn CSSWhat is CSS?

It stands for cascading stylesheet and when we say “I want to learn CSS” or “I want to modify my theme’s styles” we are referring to the process of adding custom style information to the bottom of the stylesheet of our child theme.

Why at the bottom? Because that is the way cascading stylesheets work. Whatever styles are placed at the bottom of style.css will override the styles above.

Learning CSS is fun and easy (especially since if you make a mistake, it will not break your site like working with PHP could). This video tutorial takes you through the process of modifying the styles that come with your theme, which in this case, is iThemes Builder Air (a custom child theme).

There are lots of great free tutorials available through doing a simple Google search for the type of style you are trying to accomplish. There are also online classes you can take for learning CSS more in depth. I plan to add some additional resources to this post in the future.

This tutorial is part of a series of e-courses created by Cat Scholz to empower you with using the self-hosted version of WordPress to achieve your internet marketing goals. Get more information and/or sign up:

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Video Tutorial: Installing iThemes Builder Air

If you change your theme, your content will remain. Changing the theme only changes the look and style of your site. Follow this video tutorial to install iThemes Builder Air:

Make sure you create the custom child theme and delete all the layouts except for the default layout. This will make things simpler as you are building your site.

This video takes you through all of the Builder settings in detail:

Learn how to edit your default layout.
This tutorial is part of a series of e-courses created by Cat Scholz to empower you with using the self-hosted version of WordPress to achieve your internet marketing goals. Get more information and/or sign up:

Checkout Level 1 (free)
Checkout Level 2 (on sale)
Checkout Level 3 (on sale)

Tutorial: What is a responsive theme and do I need one?

responsive theme versus non-responsive themeThe simple answer to this question in the year 2016, is a resounding YES, and you had better make sure your theme is responsive. From Wikipedia:

Responsive web design has become more important as the amount of mobile traffic now accounts for more than half of total internet traffic. Therefore, Google announced Mobilegeddon (April 21, 2015) and started to boost the ratings of sites that are mobile friendly if the search was made from a mobile device.

How can one tell if they have a responsive theme or not? On a desktop, grab the corner of your browser window and decrease the size of the browser window by dragging it towards the center of your screen. If text or images get cut off, then your theme is not responsive. On a mobile device, if you have to expand or enlarge the screen to read the text or see the images, then the website you are looking at is not responsive.

There are many responsive themes available for your self-hosted WordPress website and selecting a good responsive theme can be a bit overwhelming for the new website developer.

After over 8 years of playing around with themes, I have chosen iThemes Builder as my go-to responsive theme. iThemes Builder is being used on over 19,000 websites. With iThemes Builder you can:

  • make custom layouts for your pages/posts (and give them unique sidebars)
  • make your site look good on all devices (responsive)
  • integrate with an e-commerce plugin (I will cover this in my Level 3 e-course)
  • add a sitewide footer to every page
  • integrate with Google Analytics
  • widgetize any part of your page layout
  • easily add a favicon
  • and much, much more

When you purchase iThemes Builder’s Foundation pack, you receive the Air child theme along with some other iThemes Builder child themes. The Air child theme is a great starter theme and can be completely customized using the built-in layout editor and custom CSS styles. However, you can choose any iThemes Builder child theme to get started because they are all fully customizable.

Also, when you purchase any product from iThemes, you get great email support as long as your license is active, usually for a year. Just login to your member panel here: https://members.ithemes.com/panel/ and visit the help desk here: https://members.ithemes.com/panel/helpdesk.php.

iThemes support actively responds to support requests (typically within one business day) during normal business hours, Monday-Friday, 8am-5pm (CST).

Visit my post for a tutorial video on how to install iThemes Builder Air.

This tutorial is part of a series of e-courses created by Cat Scholz to empower you with using the self-hosted version of WordPress to achieve your internet marketing goals. Get more information and/or sign up:

Checkout Level 1 (free)
Checkout Level 2 (on sale)
Checkout Level 3 (on sale)

The perfect video blog theme

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Tubular Theme by Studio Press is the perfect premium WordPress theme for a video blog.  To see “Tubular” in action, visit this website I setup for the Debt Resolution Foundation or visit StudioPress.com for a live demo.

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