Jason Hasselkus

With wordpress, one of the things that I think is a must to change is the background of your blog. Now I’m not talking about the background of the posts, but the background to the right and left of your blog. Some people call this the gutter or “edge”. In techie webspeak this would be the body, and since Wordpress uses such good techniques in css we can utilize this to rapidly change the background of our body.

So I fire up my admin panel and navigate to the “Presentation” menu item on the top of the admin screen. From there I make sure that my current theme is the one I want to edit and select “Theme Editor”. From there I choose the “style.css” file to start editing. One really nice thing about the default theme is that the styles.css file is broken down nicely and we can go right to the area we need to change immediatly.

Find the following:
body {
font-size: 62.5%; /* Resets 1em to 10px */
font-family: ‘Lucida Grande’, Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif;
background-color: #d5d6d7;
color: #333;
text-align: center;
}

From here we are going to change the background-color to: background: url(images/background.gif);
After that, just click the “Update File”, and your off and running. In my blog you will see that the entire background becomes a different shade of gray. Try it out yourself with your own image and you’ll be amazed at how different your blog begins to look.