Themes and appearances

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Hi I am trying to build a small (10-20 pages) photography web site finding it difficult to get the look I want (black, centered with top navigation with drop down links and logo at top along the whole width of the page)

My main questions are can you set a master page so that new pages have all the same look? I have to manually style each page eg set the theme, insert logo. Also I am changing themes but would like to change for all pages as well so at the moment as end up with a mixture of styles without manually replacing each page.

timormephotography.co.uk

Thanks guys
Tim

 
adajad replied on at Permalink Reply
adajad
If you build your own theme (with the default page types) you can easily apply the theme to your whole site from the dashboard.

There are several how-tos on theme building and if you have some html and css knowledge you will probably have your theme done in about 2 hours after reading through some how-tos.

Try this one (excluding any information regarding scrapbook, if there are any): http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/how-tos/designers/making-a-t...

I suggest you also browse through the Documentation section here on concrete5.org so you know where to find the information you might need. There is also the irc chat channel (#concrete5 on freenode) where people will help you if you post a question.
JohntheFish replied on at Permalink Reply
JohntheFish
Adajad's comment about setting a theme globally from the dashboard is the main thing you are missing.

I used to mess about designing themes. But honestly there are so many great themes available, paid and free, that I don't think it is worth anyone's time unless they have a big budget or are a theme specialist. When I add up what a few days of my time are worth (the time to design a complete theme package), a few dollars to buy a theme from the marketplace is a pittance and frees me to spend those hours more productively.

So my strategy for themes is to look for a marketplace theme that is the right shape and general functionality for what I want (I completely ignore colour and font). Then I customise it to be what I want by:
- Customization in the dashboard
- Overriding theme CSS and adding my own CSS (usually with my Style Quickie addon)
- Maybe adding a page type to the theme or changing area names or swapping areas and global areas.

Colour schemes and fonts are usually trivial to change.