WordPress has a feature called the Theme Customizer. We leverage this tool to make it easy for you to change your logo, colors, background, fonts and other aspects of your site’s appearance (dependent on what the theme supports). One of the best parts of this tool is that it lets you preview your changes in real-time before saving. That way you can get things just right before showing your audience.
Contents
Using the Customizer
- Go to Appearance > Customize.
- Click on a section on the left.
- Make a change.
- View the preview on the right (allow a couple seconds for preview to update).
- Click Save & Publish at the top.
Customizer demonstration with Saved theme
Specific Features
Most features of the Customizer are self-explanatory or have visible instructions. We provide additional information here.
Logo
You can upload a logo image. The best size varies per theme. Go to Specific Themes, click on your theme, and look for the Image Sizes section. If you don’t have a logo image, you can enter text instead.
HiDPI Logo
A HiDPI logo is optional. Apple calls their high resolution screens “Retina”. Other makers are also producing high resolution displays too. These screens are able to show extremely sharp graphics but graphics need to be optimized for them. Our themes are “Retina-ready” out of the box but the logo is your responsibility.
When you upload your logo, the Customizer shows a “Retina Logo” field. This high resolution logo should be exactly twice the size of your regular logo. It should be made at that size in order to maintain quality (simply upscaling a small raster logo results in poor quality). The theme will show this high resolution version of the logo on displays that support it. What happens is the double sized image is reduced to regular size, effectively doubling the pixel density and making the logo appears extra sharp.
Background
Some of our themes support background images and/or coloring.
Background Image
If you use the full screen option, we recommend using the largest dimensions possible (2400×1800 can work well) while maintaining a low file size (under 300 KB is recommended). Tip: Set the background color to match the background image. This color will show for a short moment while the image loads. If the background color is very different from the background image, the user may notice a “flash” effect.
Background Color
Some background patterns are colorable but some are not. To use a solid color, be sure to remove the background image first. To do this, click the image’s thumbnail then Remove.
You are absolutely free to remove “Powered by ChurchThemes.com” from the footer notice. If you are happy with the theme and would like to help other churches build a good website, we do appreciate you sharing about us with others (feel free to use our Affiliate Program).
You can specify which social media icons to show in the header and footer of most of our themes. Simply enter the URLs for your social media profiles, one per line, in the order in which you want the icons to show.
Widgets
WordPress now lets you manage widgets in the Customizer. This is especially helpful for managing your homepage’s widget-based content with a live preview before publishing the changes. See the the Homepage Guide for instructions specific to your theme. Non-homepage widgets (e.g. footer, sidebar) can also be managed in the Customizer.
Managing homepage widgets with Saved