I cannot find a theme that meets my requirements
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Hi there,
I host a blog at lowvistech.com to write reviews and share imformation on technology for the visually impaired. Given the purpose of my blog I need a theme that supports fairly large font, but I also want a custom header to be available. I want a theme that supports post excerpts or simply post titles on the category pages of my blog and would also be very happy if all of this came in a free theme.
The current theme I am using is ‘Titan’ and I like it but think that the widgets at the side don’t display well and it doesn’t support a custom header very well.
I tried lots of themes and the closest I could find to what I wanted was the ‘responsive’ theme, but was put off by the fact that this theme cannot be zoomed in on Apple iOS devices.
Would the CSS upgrade help me to build a suitable theme? Is there a theme that would work for the things I specified above?
Thanks in advance
DanielThe blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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With the CSS upgrade, you can do quite a bit of customization to the theme—especially increasing font sizes to a default that is more suitable to your audience.
With your theme now, can you explain what you mean by the widgets don’t display well and doesn’t support a custom header very well? Understanding the limitations of your current theme can help me understand better what to look for, or to avoid, when suggesting themes.
Cheers!
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Hi,
Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. What my mean when I say that the widgets don’t display well is that they don’t look very good. I would prefer if they displayed in seperate sections or boxes.
As for the header, there is no option to hide the header shown by default on the titan theme without deleting my blog name and tagline- I don’t want to do this as it would surely effect search engine optimisation. (?) Also there is no option to display a header across the whole top of my blog, it just fills a small section.
Things that I’m looking for in a new theme are:1) Large menu tabs
2) Text of a similar size to that in titan (Larger if possible)
3) A top header space for displaying a banner (Important, but not essential)
4) The ability to zoom in using mobile browsers
5) The ability to display titles or excerpts of posts in category pages
6) If the majority of text on each page was a dark colour on a white background or a bright colour on a dark background to display content with a good contrast for a low vision audience.I would also really like a button feature which could raise or lower the text but from what I gather this isn’t possible with wordpress.com.
Also I’ve read the wordpress page on the CSS upgrade but wondered if it gives full control to completely edit a theme or if it just gives options to change font size, style and colour?Thanks for your help,
Daniel -
Howdy,
With the CSS upgrade, you can change anything that CSS can control—the sizes, fonts, colors, font sizes of any elements on the page. You can not add new code or alter the code that actually produces the content (just the display of the content, which is what CSS handles).
With your list, 1, 2, and 6 can be done with CSS.
3. Could be done to an extent. It is a bit of a stretch though with my understanding of what you’re asking for. Safe bet would be to say likely no.
4. The ability to zoom-in or not on browser is a combination of the theme and the device. When a site is considered “mobile-optimized”, the device won’t allow the zooming. There’s not a way to “deactivate” that on themes that report being optimized to the device though.
5. This is theme-dependent. Different themes have different displays for the category pages.
For the text-changing button, you’re right that we don’t have that option on WordPress.com. Folks using browser’s zoom feature should work, as a workaround.
For themes, Twenty Twelve is a popular, basic theme that is relatively straightforward to customize. Have you checked that one out?
When you’re solid on the the theme to start with, our CSS forum at https://en.forums.wordpress.com/forum/css-customization is a great place for getting direction on how to use CSS to change up your theme.
Cheers.
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I checked out the twenty twelve theme but found that excerpts are not available in the category pages. I will probably just stick with the Titan theme for now.
Thanks very much for your help,
Daniel -
Just an update on my last post. I have found the itheme2 theme to be the most suitable for my blog.
Thanks for all your help,
Daniel -
Thanks for the update! I haven’t used that theme much, so it didn’t come to mind initially (the downside of having 200+ themes!).
Best of luck!
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