Ever wake up one morning and think to yourself:
“Jeepers self, if only I could learn how to change my niche blog’s appearance by simple tweakies without breaking it for the win!”
If so you’re definitely not alone – HTML and CSS (the stuff that makes your blog look like, well, your blog) has such a scary reputation for non-techie folk that they often think they can never understand it.
That’s why you’ll love the following (and be sure to return back once you’re done so you can benefit from the goodies I uncovered for you):
There, you’ll discover goodies like:
“You don’t need a degree in coding to make simple changes to your blog’s CSS!
In fact, you don’t even need to touch your site’s stylesheet (style.css) which is where all of your CSS code is stored.
This is great news because messing up the stylesheet can really do a lot of damage to your site.
Instead, we’re going to use WordPress’s Customizer to add CSS code that will ultimately not affect the stylesheet file – it will simply “overwrite” it in a way that’s easy to change and reverse.
Start by looking at the lefthand side of your WordPress dashboard for the “Appearance” link. Hover over it and click on “Customize.”
This feature allows you to make changes to many aspects of your site and see the results in real-time!”
and
“… Now, not all changes in the Customizer are going to reflect in the preview window.
This is because the browser first looks to the style.css file for the rules and sometimes your CSS doesn’t override that.
So if you’re not noticing changes in real-time, simply add !important directly after the value of each CSS property.
For example, to override a font size change, you may need to use:
p {font-size: 24pt!important;}
This tells the browser, “Hey, I know the site’s code is stored in the style.css file and that’s where you look first, but I want you to pay attention to this code instead.”
This is how we can make changes to the CSS without touching the original code, meaning that if you mess up here you can simply delete what you’ve added and everything goes back to normal…”
and more!
Mastering HTML/CSS is a topic that could make for a grand challenge, cheatsheet, tutorial and more. You could structure it like so:
Step 1.) Give Yourself Permission to Learn HTML
Need help with that? Consider:
www.tutorialspoint.com/html/index.htm
Next, move to:
Step 2.) Give Yourself Permission to Learn CSS
Need resources for that? Consider:
www.tutorialspoint.com/css/index.htm
Finally, move to:
Step 3.) Give Yourself Permission to Try Customizing!
Need resources for that? Consider:
kinsta.com/blog/wordpress-css/
www.greengeeks.com/tutorials/article/3-simple-ways-to-add-custom-css-to-your-wordpress-website/
www.hostinger.com/tutorials/edit-html-wordpress
Good stuff!
Your takeaway?
You don’t have to be dependent upon paying others to change how your site looks and feels… you can take advantage of the above resources to take ownership yourself.
Why not take advantage of that today?
Enjoy!