Our March meeting will be held on the traditional “Third Thursday”, March 19th at CubeSpace from 6pm until 7:30pm. This month’s meeting is going to feature a talk by Nathan Bergey, aka @natronics on CSS and how you can take a theme and really make it your own. From his description:

So you’ve got a blog, and after browsing through hundreds of free WordPress themes online you’ve found one that you like. But it’s not quite perfect. You don’t like that orange color. Or the titles are too big. Or it’s typeset in the wrong font. It’s okay, but it’s not yours. If only you knew just a little about Cascading Style Sheets, then you could tweak things to your hearts desire.

Good news! It’s not that hard. I’ll show you how to get started tweaking an existing WordPress theme. I’ll start simple and explain the basics of CSS selectors and properties. Then I’ll show off some some tools that make it easy to figure out what part of the code you need to change. I’ll go through several real world examples looking at how to change fonts, colors and spacing. Then I’ll show how to add icons or background images to an element. I’ll also try to highlight some common pitfalls and things to look out for. I’ll also be around to try to answer specific questions about how to fix something on your site. Already know some CSS-fu? You should come too and help people out and correct anything I might say that’s wrong.

I personally have come up against this in a few different ways so I am pleased to get more knowledge on this subject. It seems like it could go both ways though: Once I know even more about customizing my site will I ever blog or will I just continually monkey around with the layout? I can’t wait to find out! I want to reiterate Nathan’s invitation to anyone with strong CSS-fu to show up and help out. See you then!