Yesterday, I discussed some of the reasons behind changing Contented Niche’s theme. Today, I’m going to take a closer look at what some of those changes entailed. Think of it as a kind of guide for simple things to look for when modifying a free WordPress theme.

The Dreamworks Redux theme was pretty good at stock, but I prefer to take the semi-custom route with my blogs. To be quite honest, this site isn’t yet earning enough to warrant a custom theme, and taking the time to do a little design work is a nice aside from my day job.

In any event, it was the color palette that first drew me to this particular theme. It was a splendid mix of blues and greys–two of my favorite colors. I thought they just worked for a blog that will ultimately be about making your niche content. Not nearly as gothic or dreary as the previous theme I was using.

Immediately, I knew I wanted the theme to be three columns. The blog has to be ad supported in some fashion, and I needed that third column to display advertisements. Since the 125px square is all the rage right now, heading for roughly a 250px to 260px third column seemed like the natural thing to do. So I shrunk the size of the main column (where the post and page content is located) and added the third column. The range I was shooting for was much too large, however, so I had to scale it back for better usability on smaller screens. Obviously, the header, background, and footer needed to be widened, and that was accomplished in about ten minutes with Photoshop.

From there, it was all about minor cosmetic changes. I replaced the sidebar and footer headers with straight text instead of graphics–and I also improved the typography to match the flow of the theme. I scrapped the calendar icons on the left in favor of inline dates. And I borrowed the comment styles from Vinh Le’s site, the Blog Design Blog. I also made some changes to the comments, allowing them to alternate colors depending on the post count. Other minor changes were made throughout.

So what’s the lesson you should take home from this? Always make at least a few tweaks to whatever free theme you decide to use. If you have even the slightest skill with XHTML, PHP, and CSS, put what you know to work. There are countless resources on how to edit WordPress themes–so take advantage of them. I knew next to nothing about web design/development when I first started blogging last year, and now I’ve fully customized several themes and hope to release a few designs of my own by the end of the year. Practice makes perfect.

What are some changes you’ve made to free themes? Were they major or minor, and how long did they take?