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Almost every blogger would like their design to be different from everyone else’s. After all, that’s one more thing that can set you apart from the crowd. However, not every blogger has experience with CSS. If you fit that description, I’ve written this just for you!

This isn’t really an introduction to CSS. It’s more of a guide to change specific elements within your theme. Over the course of several posts, I’m going to cover some things you can do to your current theme to add your own flavor and style. In this post, we’ll take a look at the text.

In your theme directory, the style.css file will be our focus. Assuming you have an installed version of Wordpress, there are two different approaches to editing the stylesheet. You can go to admin/presentation/theme-editor/stylesheet, and edit the file there, or you can open the stylesheet in a text editor, edit the file, then upload it to your server. I would recommend the latter. Any basic text editor will do the trick. In this example, we’ll edit the style sheet of my Paintbrush theme using Notepad. ***Before changing anything, make a back-up copy of the original style.css file.***

Font Family

How the text on your website looks is dependent on the font that’s chosen. Making changes to the fonts on a theme doesn’t seem like a big change, but they can change how your site looks more than you realize. The font you decide to use must be installed on each visitor’s computer to be displayed. Because of this, there are only a handful of different fonts that are commonly used for the text on a website. The most common ones are Arial, Helvetica, New Times Roman, Verdana, and Georgia.

When you open your theme’s stylesheet, in the body section, you’ll notice that there’s probably more than one font listed. The reason for this is because if your visitor’s computer doesn’t have the first listed font installed, it will go to the second, and on down the list.

Let’s change the first font listed from Verdana to Arial. Let’s save the changes and see how it looks.

Do you see the change? Arial is tighter and a little smaller. If you use Arial, I would recommend listing Helvetica second in your list, because it’s very similar to Arial. Most computers have one or the other.

Experiment with the other fonts to find what you think looks best.

Font Size

This is another element that comes down to personal preference. Although larger fonts are easier to read, smaller fonts arguably look more attractive. In Paintbrush, the default font size is 14px. Let’s change that to 12px, and check out the results.

Still in the body section of your stylesheet, change the font size from 14px to 12px.

Experiment with different font sizes until you find what fits best. There really is no right or wrong. Just fix it the way you like it. If you mess it up, you can always re-upload that copy you made of the original.

Other Posts In This Series

• Understanding Layout
• Replace Your Blog Title with a Logo
• How To Change the Width of Your Blog Design