Of Tweaking & Tweezing

More adventures from the Wonderland of WordPress.

I’m now as far as Part V in Lisa Sabin-Wilson’s WordPress for Dummies. This section is all about Customizing WordPress. In other words, this section is aimed at two sorts of people:

1. Those who know a lot about HTML, CSS, and all the other strange abbreviations associated with web design. Clue: Not Me
2. Masochists who have a perverted desire to torture themselves with their own fuckwittery (or should I say “fuckwidgetry”?) and inability to get to grips with all things technical. Clue: Me

Chapter 12 – Understanding Themes & Templates – was reasonably straight forward. I learned that a theme is a collection of templates which, in turn, are made up of template tags. Or something to that effect. I analysed stylesheets and theme functions, and tried to convince myself that I knew what I was doing.

My problems began in Chapter 13. Tweaking Themes is about as pleasant as tweezing eyebrows, and about as pain-free as a bikini wax. My goal was simple: change the background colour in the default theme from white to black. There were seven easy steps to follow, and follow them I did.

And nothing happened. Nada! My background colour stubbornly remained white. I deleted what I’d done and repeated the seven steps. Still no difference. I got The C-Man. He followed the same bloody instructions that I’d followed and the fucking background changed from white to black. Aargh! At least he had the good sense not to look smug.

Once I’d fortified myself with coffee and chocolate, I decided to tackle WordPress again. This time, I did what I’ve done for the last fifteen years when faced with a computer problem. I restarted the computer. Then I invented a hex code and randomly pasted it into the iNove theme. And now I have a pretty blue background!