10 Tutorials for Improving Your Blog Theme

Blog theme designers have all kind of options when it comes to things they can do with the theme. There are a lot of helpful tutorials out there that can help you to improve your theme, and in this post we will feature 10 of them. These tutorials will show a variety of different things you can do to improve your theme in one way or another.

Create Fancy Share Box with CSS and jQuery

Many blogs include links/icons/widgets to encourage visitors to vote on the content at various social media sites. In this tutorial, Janko shows us how to create a box with icons to several different social media sites, and how to use jQuery to make it fancy.

How to Add Custom Bookmark Links to WordPress

At Line25, Chris Spooner also has a tutorial for creating an area for encouraging social media votes. His tutorial is intended for WordPress themes, and he uses a CSS sprite for the icon images.

Create a Lifestream of Your Online Activities

Also on Line25, this tutorial shows how to make a lifestream of activities at various social media and social networking sites. This tutorial shows you how to create a separate site for lifestreaming, however, the same things can be done on your blog to help you to be able to connect with readers.

How to Set Up a Killer WordPress Testing Environment Locally

While you are working on improving your blog theme you probably do not want it to be publicly visible until it is complete. One of the options is to set up a local testing environment. In this tutorial from NETTUTS we find the details of what is involved and the set-by-step process of setting it up.

Learn How to Style Articles for Print and Email

Also from NETTUTS, here we find a detailed tutorial for allowing our articles to be more friendly for printing and emailing. Some visitors may want to interact with posts in various ways and this tutorial can help.

Create a Stunning Lightbox-Style Random-Post Header Gallery

Jeff Star shows us how to create a cool lightbox-style header that can help to make your blog theme more unique. The tutorial uses custom fields to to create the random post header image that will be displayed before the loop.

Moving Boxes

Based on previous tutorials, Chris Coyier provides the code for an interesting slider that zooms in and out.

How to Add an Announcement Box to Your WordPress Theme

Zach Dunn shows us how to create an announcement box through the use of the options panel in WordPress. All of the code is provided to get this up and running on your own WordPress blog.

Create a Digg-Style Post Sharing Tool with jQuery

Kevin from Queness provides this tutorial for creating a share feature similar to the one used at Digg. This is one more way to add social media interaction into your blog theme to make it easier for visitors.

jQuery Sliding Tab Menu for Sidebar Tutorial

Also from Queness, this tutorial shows how to create a sliding tab menu in your sidebar. Many blogs are now using tabbed menus in their sidebars, but this slide effect adds something unique.

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