Last August I presented a WordPress workshop that taught the basics of customizing a WordPress theme. As part of the workshop, I created a 60 page step-by-step tutorial with an exercise of making over the default WordPress theme with several customizations to the theme including;

• Creating a child theme
• Changing the width of the theme
• Changing colors, fonts and positioning in the header
• Widening the sidebar
• Creating a custom home.php file to use for the home page
• Adding conditional content in the sidebar
• Create custom wide page template with no sidebar for photo gallery

In the workshop we went through this makeover exercise step by step and each workshop participant received their own copy of the tutorial. I’ve been meaning to make this tutorial publicly available for some time now and just haven’t had the time to do it. But today is the day.

Download the WordPress Theme Makeover Tutorial (6.4 MB PDF)

I hope it’s helpful. I’d recommend going through this on a test site, not your live business site. Good luck!