What Can I Customise?
As mentioned in Section 4, most WordPress templates allow quite a bit of customisation, overcoming the limitations of using a generic design.
You’ll want to at least insert your logo into the header of the template – disregard any template that doesn’t allow this. Next, you may be able to edit the colour scheme to match your branding. A new colour scheme goes a long way to making your template look unique.
Lastly, a common design element to change is the background. For this you could use a texture or pattern, or you could use an image related to your business. The latter takes a little skill to get right – some of the worst looking sites on the web attain this status through terrible backgrounds. But, if you do get it right, it can create a great looking, branded, unique website for your business.
About Image Formats
It’s worth knowing just a little about image formats when working with your website. The three main ones are .jpg, .gif and .png. These refer to the compression applied to images to make them small enough to send over the internet.
.jpg compression is commonly used for photos as it works best with images using a very large range of colours.
.gif compression works best with smaller colours, and can create very small images in this case. It’s good for logos or cartoon type images.
.png is a newer format, offering the best of both .jpg and .gif, and is becoming a very popular choice across the web.
Main Tutorial: A Tour of The Main Branding Options
Second Tutorial: Image Editing 101
Video Summary and Resources
Editing Your Images
How Transparency Works
Company logos are often irregular in shape, but an image must be rectangular. This leads to the annoying situation in which you may have a coloured background obscured by a white rectangle surrounding the logo, as shown. In order to blend the logo with the coloured background, you must make the white transparent, ie. invisible!
This is easily done in any image editing programme, but can only be achieved with either a .gif or a .png image. Have a look at the video tutorials to find out how.