Turner's Perspective

Popular Wordpress blog themes are popular for a reason. They're good and they work. They're well written and come with the most features. But it also means lots of blogs will have the potential to look just like yours.

Julie Ferenzi's blog, Living In Plainfield, uses the Misty Look Theme by Sadish Bala. It is one of the top ten most downloaded themes for Wordpress. We chose this Wordpress theme for its clean look, wide post window and customizable header. But even after we changed the header, I would see other blogs using the same theme with the same basic color scheme. Changing the header graphic just wasn't enough to differentiate it.

Here is what it looked like before:

 
So, we decided to give it a new paint job.

The green hued theme is fairly recognizable. Several AR members have their other blogs in this theme and this color scheme. So, we decided to change to a new color palette by editing the CSS (Style Sheet) information. There are a number of places you can turn to for help in choosing a color scheme, CoulourLovers and Kuler are my two favorites. I actually subscribe to the Kuler's "Highest Rated" RSS feed. Yes, that's another sign that I'm a geek at heart. 

But I found another way to find at a good color scheme that I liked even better for this purpose - The Color Palette Generator. It reads the colors in an uploaded photo and generates a color scheme, compete with hex codes. We had already created a header image we liked, so I uploaded the image into The Color Palette Generator and it spit out the scheme you see on the graphic below.

So, using those colors as the reference, we went in and edited the styles for her post headlines, the sidebar headlines and the sidebar links, as well as the overall background of the page. We actually mixed the dull and vibrant palettes. The change we made is subtle, but it does the job and the colors match perfectly with the main header image.

Here is the new paint job:

Editing CSS is not for the faint of heart. If looking at pages of code makes your head hurt, TLW [SVW], then find someone who can assist you. It won't cost you much. The actual CSS change took less than 5 minutes.  The time consuming part is usually coming up with the color scheme. But not this time. The Color Scheme Generator did it for us in seconds.

Try it with the main image from your blog and see what it comes up with for you.