001in this video we're going to be talking about how to customize your chosen WordPress theme with WordPress you begin building your site by selecting a theme but that theme can then be customized further until ultimately you create the site that you want themes are great starting points for building your website they are premade layouts that quite often come with stock content a theme can then be customized further by you to make it more unique themes come with things like images backgrounds and color schemes as well as their own layouts of content WordPress has thousands of themes available currently we're using the default WordPress 2017 theme when logged into the WordPress dashboard we can customize our theme by heading to the appearance section of the sidebar and then choosing customize you'll see a live preview of
002the theme on the right side of the screen this allows you to make changes to the appearance of your site and preview them before the changes go live here you can see the active theme or you can also change the active theme of your site you can see what themes are installed on your site we'll talk about how to add more themes later the customizer will be different depending on the used theme but most themes will include these basic customization options inside site identity you can choose a logo which will appear next to the site title you can also change the title and tagline here of your website you can also use a site icon which will be used as the shortcut icon in your browser ensure that your icon fits the dimensions needed you
003can also change the color scheme that is used throughout the website as well as customize the color for the header text if you so choose this theme also allows you to use a header video such as an uploaded video or a link to a YouTube URL you can also customize the header image with whatever you want you can also crop the image to the needed dimensions there's also an option to upload multiple header images and have the site swap between them each time a user visits from the menus section of the customizer you can customize the navigational menu which your visitors will use to navigate your website this menu appears across the top of your right and we'll have pages that are most commonly visited you can customize what pages are in this menu as
004well as reorder them and add individual pages within the menu you can also add custom links for access for your visitors other options include location and automatically add new pages to the menu the widgets section allows you to customize the widgets on your theme widgets are sections of content on your site that appear in specific areas of your page on this theme you'll see the label sidebar this label controls the sidebar widget to edit the content of a widget use the widget section in the customizer I can choose what widgets are displayed where and also make a few settings changes for individual widgets you can also reorder the order of the widgets or add any new ones will cover widgets more in depth in another video by default this theme will display the posts in
005chronological order on the front page of the site acting as a home page but you can also create a static homepage for your website as well you can set a static home page to be the front page of the website and also where to put your post page you can see now we have placeholder sections now on the home page finally you can customize CSS styles of your website CSS allows you to customize the appearance and layout of your site using code you can learn more about CSS from the help icon at the top of the CSS section in the customizer make sure you hit save and publish after making changes to your site as this will save the changes that you've made at the bottom of the customizer you can switch between previews on
006different devices such as tablet mobile or desktop once you're satisfied with all of your customizations hit save and publish to save your changes now we can head back to the dashboard the seams subpanel in the dashboard is where you can manage your installed themes here you can see all of the installed themes that are available for use on your site clicking on a theme you can find out more information as well as access a few customization options such as widgets menus and header the live preview button on the currently not use themes allows you to see what the theme would look like on your website to add a new theme click the plus button from the themes page you'll have access to many free themes from the WordPress theme directory and once you find a
007theme you like you can easily install it there are also thousands of premium themes available as well if you've purchased one you can use the upload button to upload a zip archive of the theme you've purchased WordPress will automatically upload the theme files to the correct location like we did earlier you can make customizations to the premium themes as well as you can see using themes it's very easy to build the website of your dreams using WordPress using the customizer as well as a selection of free and premium themes you can create a professional looking website and personalize it to make it your own with dot Easy and WordPress it's never been easier to use a theme to make a website that is unique to you thanks for watching and stay tuned to this channel
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