How does theme customization work?

The idea of setting apart oneself from the rest, particularly when it comes to marketing and branding is not new. From personalized car number plates, customized furniture, customized cell phone design – people want to personalize things to make them stand out.  There are now WordPress theme customization services available to help you turn a generic theme into a professionally branded website. 

To give you an overview, a theme is a basic idea for a website design that you can place your own personal stamp on.  Like for example, a birthday party where the theme of the party is “Hawaiian”. You will see that from decorations, food, tables and chairs, color motifs and even host and guest attire are all related to “Hawaii”.

WordPress themes follow this same concept.  Theme developers create themes with a central idea in their mind. For example the theme Erudite, which is for writers.  The layout and colors of the theme is for avid readers not for quick visitors.  It is plain with a black and white motif. In contrast, the theme My Mag is a magazine theme, and replicates a paper magazine.  On the home page you will see featured articles, big pictures, what’s new etc.

Although there are a variety of themes available some people want to further customize them. They might like the layout but they do not like the colors or the font used.  They may want a bigger header or a single column layout instead of three.  Or they might like the theme, but want to change bits of it so their site stands out among the others using this exact theme. This is where theme customization comes in.

By default, WordPress themes are generic, and the theme developer will give you options to change elements of the design. You can modify the theme to suit your business or personal blogging needs. As it is built on a free open source platform, you have the liberty to modify it even without the permission from its theme developer.  The PHP and CSS files are located in the WordPress admin panel and can also be accessed via FTP.  If you have knowledge of CSS and PHP, customizing the theme will be easy for you, but if you do not have such skills it is highly recommended that you look for WordPresstheme customization services.