Some newbie questions

  • Hi guys, sorry if this is some really basic stuff and if you don’t feel like explaining it I would really appreciate some relevant links if you have them to the problems I am currently having.

    So I have a kind of decent understanding of CSS and html I guess (nothing I could create from scratch, more like google/trial&error/etc). I’ve built websites before (not as a job, just for friends with small businesses)… but I’m really struggling getting used to this wordpress platform. I’ve heard its pretty easy to learn so I’m getting pretty frustrated. I have searched for answers to no avail (though admittedly I could spend a lot more time searching and maybe find my answers, but I figured I’d ask here since there are probably some people who know a lot and these would be fairly easy questions for them to answer).

    Anyway, here is the site I’ve just started: https://www.thegardentendernj.com for my aunt’s small gardening business. The theme I’m using is Accelerate. So here are a few of my main questions:

    1) Is it possible to create different stylesheets that I could implement for different pages? For example if I want a border around something on one page, but not the other? (It’s probably not the most effective way but in the past I usually just create style.css, style1.css, etc instead of trying to build everything into one stylesheet)
    2) Is it possible to go through an FTP program and just manually edit the code of specific pages?
    3) How can I get rid of the archives and meta boxes on the front page? I’d like instead to put two smaller rounded boxes that I could either put an image and/or text in. These are things I could easily figure out if I was just looking at raw code but I can’t seem to figure out how to do it through wordpress.
    4) And most importantly, did I mess up by making this whole website a blog? I just want the blog page to be updated with blog posts whenever she writes them

    Any help whatsoever would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Hey jerseycomp!
    I am brand new also but I know absolutely nothing about programing. I can answer #3. Go to Dashboard>Appearance>Widgets. There you can move any widgets to the inactive box to keep them from appearing in your sidebar.

    Thread Starter jerseycomp

    (@jerseycomp)

    Thanks for the reply Cydney! The strange thing is I already removed the archive and meta widgets from the right sidebar, but for some reason they are both still appearing…

    Yo jerseycomp,

    #1. No need for multiple stylesheets to do that. Just use the Accelerate theme’s built-in custom css area by going to Appearance -> Theme Options, then clicking on the Design tab. There, you can style a specific page’s elements by targeting its page id or class. You can use Chrome developer tools or Firefox’s firebug to inspect different elements and find different page’s class/id’s. For example, to target something on your Services page, you would start with .page-id-15, whereas the About page is .page-id-2. (View your site with the aforementioned web tools to see how to find this info quickly)

    #2. Any changes you make to the core theme and template files like page.php would be over-written any time you update the theme. If you want to go this route, make a child theme for your site first. See codex documentation.

    #3. Don’t forget to hit Save before leaving a changed widget. Alternatively, it could just be a caching issue or you not refreshing your browser after changing something. I don’t see the archive and meta boxes at present.

    #4. WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS); it’s not just for blogging! You can have a bunch of static menu pages and a menu tab just for your posts/blog. No problem there.

    Happy WordPressing!

    Thread Starter jerseycomp

    (@jerseycomp)

    Thanks jeffnar, very helpful info!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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