Modifying the look of a theme
The theme we chose for SEO Tutorials is called Tulip Time by Highlands by Design. This theme was chosen as it is supposed to be quite SEO friendly. Other themes can be found here. We then modified the theme after installing it to give SEO Tutorials its own unique look.
Modifying the look of the theme was quite simple. In Windows Explorer, open the image folder of the theme and view the images as thumbnails. Compare the images to those you see on the site and edit them in Photoshop or similar software. Ensure that the edited images are the same size as the originals, then upload them and see what happens!
You can change the size and colour of text by modifying the CSS stylesheet appropriately.
We removed some elements of the original theme (such as blogroll, calendar, footer, post date, archives etc.) as we did not feel we needed them, and some features led to duplicate content. For example, the calendar linked to posts by using a date-format URL. This meant that the same post could be reached by a number of different URLs, which is obviously bad for search engine ranking, as the engines see it as duplicate content.
The removal of the elements was done by editing the templates of the theme, to ensure WordPress only displayed what we wanted it to.
