How to Customize the Weaver Theme

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Most of my readers know that I tout the Weaver II theme (especially Weaver II Pro) as the easiest way to get started with WordPress. If you want a highly customizable site without coding, it simply doesn’t get any better than the Weaver theme. However, I also get a lot of questions from readers about what to do with the Weaver theme once they get it installed - there are so many options that it can seem overwhelming at first!

With a little practice, you can use the Weaver theme to achieve pretty much any look you want for your WordPress site. Just to give you an idea of the flexibility of Weaver II Pro, here are some of the blogs I’ve designed that use it:

• Daily Money Shot
• Elementary Librarian
• When Life Gives You Lemons
• Prairie Eco Thrifter
• Balancing Money and Life
• Makeup Wishes
• Beautiful Giveaways
• TeacHer Finance

As you can see, there are plenty of ways to make the Weaver theme your own. However, you do have to spend some time figuring out where to find the options you want.

How to Customize the Weaver Theme

Here are the steps I go through every time I work with Weaver II or Weaver II Pro:

1. Change the subtheme. You may find that one of the subthemes is a close match for the look you’re already going for, and if so that’s a great timesaver! In general, I usually change all sites to Blank Canvas - it strips away almost all the color settings and allows me, well, a blank canvas to customize as I see fit. (This option is found under Appearance > Weaver Admin > Weaver II Themes.)

2. Make general changes. Every time I use Weaver II, there are certain changes I make immediately. I start with Weaver Admin > Main Options > General Appearance and set the Wrapper Page BG to white (#FFFFFF) if it isn’t already specified. If I already know what color scheme I’m working with, I set the background color as well. Then I go to the Layout tab and set the width to 980 px or 1000 px instead of 940 px, just because I like a slightly wider look. (Any wider than that and your visitors might have to scroll from side to side to see the entire page.)

3. Set up the sidebar and widgets. Under the Widgets tab, I set the background to #FFFFFF and the bottom margin to 30 px (that creates extra space between the widgets so they aren’t right on top of each other). I usually change the Widget Title color to something that coordinates with my color scheme.

4. Set up the header. Remember in step one when we changed the width of the content area? That’s how wide the header should be. By default the header height is set to 188 px, but you can change that under Main Options > Header. Upload your header image under Appearance > Header once you’ve made it the right size. Then return to Main Options > Header and find the checkbox to “Hide Site Title/Description.” This gets rid of the text at the top of the site and shows only your header image. I also change the header background color to #FFFFFF since my headers tend to have transparent backgrounds; that way the header area is the same color as the rest of the content areas.

5. Customize the navigation bar. The nav bar appears right under the header and contains links to your pages, categories, etc. (To set up what goes on the nav bar, use Appearance > Menus to create a menu, then add the pages or links to it, then set it as the primary navigation. If you set a secondary menu, Weaver will display it above your header with the same settings as the one below the header.)

The most important things to set up under Main Options > Menus are the background color and text color. Then I always scroll down to the section called Info Bar and check the box to “hide info bar.” If not, you end up with this ugly section under your nav bar that basically contains a list of page numbers.

6. Set your link colors. If you’ve set your subtheme to blank canvas, you’re getting the ugly blue color for all the links on your site. Going to Main Options > Links will allow you to change the colors of normal links, post title links, widget area links, footer links, etc.

7. Adjust the font size if needed. Personally, I think the overall font size of 12 is a little large, so I usually go to Main Options > Fonts and change the Site Base Font Size to 11. I also use Arial for both the titles and content in most cases. Weaver II Pro allows you to change many, many more font-related settings, but those are the basics and should be updated to reflect your preferences.

8. Go look at your site and see what you think! This is always the best part of customizing the Weaver theme - seeing what you’ve done and how much better your site looks with the customizations. If you notice something that doesn’t look quite the way you planned, you can always go back to the corresponding section and change it, then refresh the page.

Weaver II: Awesome, Powerful, and Easy

There are TONS of other ways to customize the Weaver II or Weaver II Pro theme, but these are the most basic things you need to get started. It takes me around 20-30 minutes to get the bones of a site looking the way I want using Weaver II, and the more I work with it, the faster I get.

If you’re working with Weaver II or Weaver II Pro and need help, head over to the official Weaver forums and do a search. Chances are good that your question has been asked before. If not, you can easily create an account and ask the question yourself. I’ve found that the moderators are very quick to respond, and though it sometimes takes awhile for me to adequately explain the problem, they’re always willing to work with me until I get the result I want. And of course you’re always welcome to email me with questions as well.

With all the options for customization that the Weaver theme offers, I can’t figure out why a WordPress beginner would choose any other theme. It’s possible to do just about anything with Weaver (especially Weaver II Pro - can’t recommend it highly enough, especially for the low price) once you learn to navigate the admin area and change the elements to what you want.