On Friday I did a quick (HA) WP Robot review. I’ve been using it to spiffy up sites and get dead weight making money around here.
One of the big things about spiffying up sites is finding themes. I don’t know about you, but for me, theme finding is fun and can be frustrating, AND almost always takes hours. Have you seen how many awesome themes there are out there? Not to mention the fantastic themes they keep adding to the Elegant themes membership site?
So I’m trying to be all focused here and after I had upgraded one of my new sites to wp 3.0 I saw the new default theme. Yep, the old fashioned Kubrik is gone and Twenty Ten is in. Well let me tell you what… it didn’t take long for me to fall in love.
Twenty ten is so clean. It’s a lot like the vigilance theme I had on this site before the upgrade which I really liked. The other rockin’ thing about Twenty Ten is you can super easily change the header and background to create a site that looks like no other even though it’s still using the default wordpress theme. And that just rocks.
I’ve heard they SEOd the hell out of this theme and the code is clean and super Google friendly ~ which is a bonus for sure.
So I thought I’d take a minute (because that’s really all it takes) to show you how to pimp out Twenty Ten and make your site your own.
Let’s start with a header. I’ve been creating my headers using a free program called xheader. It’s super simple to use. Just open it up and choose new then pick create a blank header.
It opens up a size box and you want to fill in 940 X 198 ~ that’s the size of the header in Twenty Ten.
Now it opens up your creation page.
Here’s how I make this super simple and easy. I go online or wherever and find 3 images that relate to my topic. I save them on my computer. I then choose the upload image button and upload all three images to the header. (they will show up all on top of one another so it looks like they disappear but just click on them and then drag them to the side).
I position the three images across the header. You can click on them and make them bigger or smaller by dragging the edges ~ just be careful you don’t make them too big they get distorted.
Once the images are positioned I save. I don’t add words to the header because Twenty Ten will put the title of your site right over the header. Xheader will give you a number of options of which level of awesomeness you would like to save. I think I usually pick the very good one ~ I can’t see the difference between them.
Save it to your computer.
Now let’s add the new header to our site. This is just as simple.
Open your dashboard and choose Twenty Ten as your theme if you haven’t already. (remember you have to have wordpress 3.0 installed on your site for this to show up).
Once you’ve chosen Twenty Ten you’ll see in the sidebar area of your dashboard a link that says header in the “appearance” section.
click that link.
Click the browse button and find the header image you saved from xheader. Then click upload.
Once it’s uploaded scroll down and click save at the bottom and click through and check out your new header.
Now ~ a new header’s great, but to really take your site to a “custom” level you might want to add a different background. This is JUST as easy, if not easier than the header.
Find an image or color or background worthy something and save it to your computer. (you can use jing to take an image of something if you need to). Go to the background link under appearance and then browse for the image and upload. Scroll down and save!
It’s that easy. Now you’ve created a custom site that is yours and yours alone and you didn’t have to spend hours searching for it. 
I used it on this Cool Christmas Gifts site and you can see it looks great.
I’d love to hear if you’re using Twenty Ten and what you think!
Other Posts That Might Help:
Jackie, do you know how to remove the time stamp on the posts on Twenty Ten? I can't figure out how to do it. I want to remove the time stamp on my anxiety blog because the topics are evergreen and I don't want to dissuade anyone from commenting on older posts, but I can't find that time stamp. Any ideas? Thanks!
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