How to modify Free wordpress thems?

I know that we cant modify free wordpress theme? like i have registered for keword.wordpress(dot)com. It doesn’t allow to modify any themes our own way . Is it possible or any hack to do this ? As i can olny chose the theme whatever i got online for free. I am not asking about paid theme or wordpress website. It’s all about free wordpress blog’s.

wordpress is very limited when it comes to free .com version, USE Blogger, Atleast you can modify the default design code and add lot of stuff if you are aware of PHP and basic HTML.

Thanks for the reply i myself have tried a lot to change the wordpress theme but finally I am not working on it. Surely i will try to go for Blogger and make good one.

Or just get a cheap hosting account and install your own wordpress. You have one step installers (fantastico is one that is used a lot). It literally takes about a minute from your hosting control panel. You can get hosting for about 5 dollars a month.

I’d go with cheap hosting, then you have full control and its at little to no cost to you, I say none because if you do ok you can make much more than your hosting fees back in ads.

I have edited many free wordpress themes with much success. The key i found is photoshop is your friend. The colors and over-all look can be greatly improved by using nice gradients to replace many of the flat colors and background of free wordpress themes. You can take a free wordpress theme that is designed well for SEO and functionality and make it look 100 times better with some good CSS coding and using soft colors (blue, orange, white) with some nice gradient work. Lots of trail and error involved to get the perfect look but it can be done with some time and skill.

If I change an current template for my own requirements, I often keep a little observe in the design.css headlines saying such not needed, I just like to do it if I’m understanding from an individual’s effort after results.

Login your dashboard , Click Appearance - Editor . Now the theme editor open and you can edit your theme .

<snip>

Don’t forget to check the licence for the theme you are using to see what changes the author allows you to make to their theme. Just because they don’t charge for using it doesn’t mean that you are allowed to change it.

A wordpress website from wordpress.com is a little restrictive so you won’t be able to ‘hack’ into it. Take a read of he arguments for a self-hosting WordPress website vs a .com one.

You can tweak things, but just like any service this cost an additional fee. Looking at their pricing it would cost a similar price to self-host your WordPress website, which would give you greater flexibility. This all depends on your know-how of WordPress.

On a self-hosted wordpress it’s a good idea to create a child theme before editing a theme. This allows you to update the theme later and still keep your changes. It’s tempting to just hack up a theme but you’ll regret it later.

<snip>

in general the free wordpress themes are in free GPL license or common creative license (this one you have to keep the author link on footer intact) But both licenses give you the ability to change and modify the theme the way you want to.
in my experience, i always stop indexing my wordpress theme, then change the logo so you can use photoshop or any other software to create your own one, then the simple way for sidebars is using widgets… and if you want to make a lot of changes so you can easily edit the css style and the header.php, footer.php and sidebar.php it’s the major files on wordpress.

Hey,

Why on earth you want to use wordpress [dot] com unless you want some extra features.
I suggest you to go to a cheap hosting, sometimes host will install a free wordpress for you or you simply can install one by one click.
Then my dear the best tool is to use firebug (a plugin of firefox) to modify the theme.
I have done lot of times. :slight_smile:

[FONT=Verdana]

Perhaps you could explain what you mean. You can’t actually modify anything with Firebug.
[/FONT]