I’ve been doing a lot of reading and watching video tutorials lately on WordPress site design. In part, this crash course is for the legitimate goal of learning how to build my site. I have to confess, though, it’s also because learning how to do something is a lot less daunting than going out and actually doing it.
Today marked a turning point. I opened the hood of my WordPress default theme and got some grease and grit under my fingernails. Yes, I suffered some scrapes and bruises, but it was a pretty thrilling first ride out with my souped up site. OK, it may still look like a Chevette, not a Corvette, but I’m making progress. So far, I’ve narrowed the vertical space in the header, moved the title and tag line onto the banner photo and added a drop shadow so that they don’t disappear in the graphics, added many more banner photos (all, my own, by the way), and added a contact form, in addition to a few invisible back-end enhancements.
What I didn’t expect was that web design, which I’d always thought of as a mostly “right-brain” endeavor, would be so “left-brain”—not so unlike the worm genetics experiments I used to do in the lab! For example, there was this pesky 2-pixel border line persisting above the banner, which I could not get rid of. I found the CSS rule, modified it, and nothing changed! After more experimenting, without really knowing much about the structure of the WordPress parent theme my site is based upon, I deduced that the 2-pixel border was under control of a different, and relatively hidden, style sheet from the one controlling the bulk of the site. Further, I realized that this hidden style sheet always reigned supreme.
Classic epistasis! (for you genetics nerds)
Ultimately, with my new found insight, I was able to obliterate that 2-pixel border by inserting ten additional characters into my style sheet: important!
Ha! Web design—I can do this!